Certified, audited, and easy to approve
Grade A BRCGS Packaging certification, food contact label manufacturing, and the documentation your technical team needs to add us to an approved supplier list without it becoming a project.
The headline
Grade A BRCGS Packaging certification.
BRCGS Packaging Materials is the packaging standard most UK food manufacturers recognise. It is GFSI-benchmarked and audited by an independent third party rather than self-declared, and Grade A reflects the outcome of that audit.
The reason it matters to you is not that we have a certificate. It is that your own food safety audit will examine how you approve and monitor your suppliers, and buying from a certificated packaging supplier is the shortest, cleanest answer to that question - a certificate check rather than a project.
A grade also sets the audit cycle. At Grade A the site stays on the annual cycle rather than dropping to six-monthly, which is the practical difference between a supplier whose certification is settled and one whose is being watched.
Ask and you will get the certificate itself, with its scope and expiry, rather than a logo on a website.
What we run
Five things that hold the standard up.
Independent audit
The certificate is not a self-declaration. An external auditor comes in, examines the site against the standard, and the grade reflects what they found. That is the difference between us telling you we run a tight factory and somebody whose job is to disagree with us saying so.
Food contact capability
We manufacture labels intended for food contact applications, with materials and inks specified for the job rather than assumed. If a label is going somewhere it will touch food, that has to be a deliberate decision at specification stage.
Quality procedures
Documented procedures covering artwork approval, material receipt, in-process checks and release. The purpose is unglamorous and specific: the label that leaves here is the label that was signed off.
Traceability
Batch traceability through material, production and despatch, tied to the approved artwork version. If a question is ever asked about a run, the answer is on record rather than reconstructed.
Manufacturing standards
A controlled production environment, maintained equipment and staff who have run food work for years. Standards are a habit here rather than a document produced for audit week.
How we think about risk
On a food label, the hazard is the printing.
Packaging hazard analysis usually starts with the physical and chemical: foreign bodies, migration, contamination. Those matter and we control them. But in label printing the most serious hazard is something else entirely.
An obsolete artwork version.
A missing “contains” statement.
An allergen that did not come through emphasised.
A barcode that will not scan at the till.
Each of those is a product safety and legality failure that originates in the print process - not a quality defect, and not something that can be inspected out at the end.
Which is why artwork control, print control and line clearance sit inside our hazard analysis rather than alongside it. The question we are answering is not “is this label well printed?” It is “is this the label that was approved, and does it still say the right thing?”
Allergen emphasis is a printing job
Worth spelling out, because it is the point where our craft and your legal exposure meet. Food information law does not simply require that allergens appear in the ingredients list - it requires that each one is emphasised so it is clearly distinguished from the rest of the list, by means of the font, style or background colour.
That is a typographic instruction. It has to survive artwork, origination, plate-making and the press, and it has to still be legible on the finished label at the size it actually prints. A bold that closes up on press, or a background tint that loses contrast, is a compliance failure rather than an aesthetic one. It is the sort of thing we would rather catch at proof stage than have your technical team catch on a pallet.
Supplier approval
How much work is approving us going to be?
A fair question, and usually the real reason a manufacturer stays with a supplier they have stopped rating. Onboarding a new packaging supplier means questionnaires, certificates and specifications, and that work lands on a technical team that is already busy.
So we try to make it a single exchange rather than a fortnight of chasing. Ask us for an approval pack and three things come back together.
- 01Our certification.
- 02Specifications for the materials we are quoting.
- 03A completed copy of your own supplier questionnaire, not a promise to complete it later.
If your process needs something we have not covered, tell us what it is. It is a great deal cheaper for both of us to answer it now than to discover it after the first order.
Being straight about it
Scope statementWhat we do not claim
Plenty of suppliers list every standard they can think of. We would rather you knew exactly what we hold, and what it covers, so that nothing on this page falls over during an audit.
Certification is scope-limited by design: a certificate covers particular processes at a particular site, and it has an expiry date. Ask us for ours and you will get the certificate itself rather than a logo - scope and expiry included - so your technical team can check it against what you actually need rather than take a badge on a website at face value.
Where you need a certification we do not hold, or a test we do not carry out, we will tell you that plainly instead of implying otherwise. It is a much cheaper conversation now than after your first order.
Reviewing your label supplier?
Let's talk.
Tell us what you make, how it is packed and what your current labels are not doing. We will come back with a specification and a straight quote.