17. Must-Have Info for your Product Packaging

Today, on Product, Packaging, and Profit, I’m breaking down the five pieces of information every product package must include to comply with U.S. labeling regulations. This is one of the most asked questions I get from clients and has some easy fixes to implement and protect your business. These insights will ensure your packaging not only meets legal requirements but also strengthens your brand.

Things you won’t want to miss:

• The significance of complying with federal regulations, focusing on the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act (FPLA)

• The need for product businesses to adhere to these regulations regardless of their size or industry

• How non-compliance with the FPLA can lead to fines from multiple states where the products are sold

• The five must-have pieces of information on your product package

• Easy formatting fixes for the trickiest part of the federal and state regulations

• Where on your packaging to include this important information

Download the Ultimate Packaging Checklist to get the FPLA visual explanations:

https://www.hiddenpathcreative.com/checklist

Intro

Hello and welcome to Product, Packaging, and Profit where we help product-based businesses turn packaging design into a competitive edge to attract customers, grow sales, and boost profits. I'm Kelley Kempel. After 20 years of designing packaging for national retailers, I founded Hidden Path Creative, a graphic design studio that supports entrepreneurs with branding and packaging to get their products seen and sold.

Episode Transcript

I'm sharing the secrets that launched big brands so your products can stand out. Let's get started. 

Hi friends. Welcome back. Let me tell you today I have a really interesting topic, although it may not look like that on the surface, but what I'm going to break down for you today are the five must-have pieces of information you need on your packaging.

This is one of the top questions that I get all the time, and the question kind of ranges from I don't know what to put on my packaging to what information do I need to have on my packaging. to be safe from a legal compliance standpoint. Before we jump into all the information, what I do want to start with is this is based on my experience working in the U. S. designing packaging for products that are going to be sold in the United States. 

So this information may not be as applicable if you are listening from another country or around the world, but Definitely, this can be a great starting point. So always look into the regulations in your area. And one of the things I recommend is getting in touch with a compliance specialist.

There are experts out there where their craft, their expertise is understanding these regulations, much like a lawyer although there isn't necessarily that law degree associated with it, but understanding the regulations and then helping entrepreneurs, product business owners make sure that their products and their packaging are tested and compliant with any applicable regulations.

But as we dive in, we are going to talk about the general five pieces of information that every product package must have in the United States. And this is actually outlined by the U. S. government in a little law called the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act. If you're ever looking for the full text on this, something you want to read, it's going to help you sleep at night.

You can find it on the FTC's website. This is actually a pretty old law as far as standards are concerned in the, the retail space, the e commerce space. This was drafted and passed in 1967. And I'm going to read a little bit about this from FTC. com to give you just the general background as they outline it.

The Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, FPLA for short, or ACT, enacted in 1967 directs the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration to issue regulations requiring that all consumer commodities be labeled to disclose net contents, identity of commodity, and name and place. of business of the product's manufacturer, packer, or distributor.

The Act authorizes additional regulations where necessary to prevent consumer deception or to facilitate value comparisons. with respect to descriptions of ingredients, slack fill of packages, use of cents off or lower price labeling, or characterization of package sizes. The basic requirements. The FPLA requires each package of household consumer commodities that is included in the coverage of the FPLA to bear a label in which there is a statement identifying the commodity.

Example, detergent, sponges, et cetera, the name and place of business of the manufacturer, packer, or distributor, and the net quantity of contacts. Contents in terms of weight, measure, or numerical count. Measurement must be in both metric and inch or pounds units. The purpose of the act, the FPLA is designed to facilitate value comparisons and to prevent unfair or deceptive packaging and labeling of many household consumer commodities.

Whoa, that's a mouthful! I'm going to break that down in like some general terms, some layman's terms. But before we do that, I want to take a little tangent here and talk to you about why this is so important to me to share with you about your product business. As we just outlined, this is a mouthful of a federal regulation that impacts every product that is sold in the United States.

And it, it doesn't matter if you are a big business, a small business, a mom and pop shop a maker. If you are selling products, this regulation applies to you. When they say consumer commodities, they are talking about just general products. And when I was working at Kohl's so I was, I worked at Kohl's as the manager, senior manager of packaging creative for about 10 years.

Early on in my time there, I worked with Our testing and compliance team to review all the standards that we had in place for packaging specifically around. These FPLA regulations. So one of the interesting things about these regulations is that it's not just the FTC that reviews products out in the marketplace up against these regulations.

Most states also have similar regulations on their books in regards to net quantity and weights and measures, and they're essentially the same regulations that are in the FPLA. However. If you are selling in any state that you are selling in can review your packaging up against their own version of the FPLA and when that happens, so especially for my friends that are selling products online, you've got an e commerce business, which means you're selling in the majority of the United States, your products in their product packaging.

Are are up against these regulations, not just for the whole U. S. but for each state and something anecdotal anecdotally that was happening early on in my tenure at Kohl's was that the states were looking for revenue. They were looking around going, you know, we've got some, we need to add some extra revenue to our budgets and.

They saw that they could get some fine revenue, essentially from reviewing product packaging on the shelves and finding companies for not being compliant with these. Weights and measures regulations. And what that means essentially is the liability for your business is if you're not following these regulations, if you're not including this product information on your packaging in the format that it is outlined, your company could be fined in every state that you do business in, in every state that you sell your product.

And I just don't want to see anybody in that situation. I don't want to see you. You have that happen. I don't want to see you get a fine in one state or get a fine from the FTC, let alone have it happen in multiple states because there are such easy fixes that we can make to your packaging to ensure that you are compliant with the FPLA and with the weights and measures in all of the different states.

So that is where we get to in this episode and this information around. The information that you must have on your product packaging. Now, if we think back to what I read from FTC. com and the FPLA regulation, I'm going to go back and review those basic requirements that the FPLA requires for each package.

To include a statement identifying the item, the name and place of business of the manufacturer, packer, or distributor, and the net quantity of contents in terms of weight, measure, and or numerical count. So those are three bullet points, but I like to break this out into five and we'll walk through this and I'll tell you exactly why.

So first and foremost, to be compliant against this, you need to have your brand name and or your logo on the front of a package and that is to cover the name of the business of the manufacturer packer, or distributor. So that a shopper can identify who the maker and or distributor of the product is.

So you want to have that on the front of the package. From a branding standpoint, I want to see you use your logo. I want to see you use your color palette for, but from a legal standpoint, all you need is to have your brand name. on that front of the package. So that's number one. Easy peasy. All right. Next up, I want to go into breaking down that statement of identifying the commodity that is around telling the customer what your product is.

And if you go over to My blog, I've got a, I've got a blog about this as well called the five pieces of information every product package must have. And if you look there, I actually have points two and three-point points-to-point number two is the product name, and number three is the description of the product.

And I want to talk a little bit about why I've broken that down into two things. So when it comes to having a statement identifying the product, it can be a little tricky. What you want to make sure is you want to make sure that you have a statement on the front of the package that tells the customer clearly what that product is.

For a lot of product businesses, you may also have a product name that is a little more fanciful. It's a little more abstract. Fanciful is a, you know, what our lawyer friends like to call a name that is not descriptive. So one thing, one area that we can relate this to perhaps is candles. So with candles, typically what's announced as more of the product name has to do with the product fragrance itself, but that fragrance isn't actually the description of the product.

A description of a product needs to be a plain language statement that somebody can read and immediately understand what the product is. So if you have a scented candle. Your description of the product is a scented candle, but your product name may actually be the Fragrance of the product. So that's why I like to break that into two pieces There are other other products that I've worked with where you know, it especially happens in things like flavor names and Candle fragrance names.

And when you have products that have different varieties, when it comes to colors the great thing is, is that if you have a product like that, where you've got all these variations, and the fragrance is the main thing you want your customer to understand, or the. The color or or whatever it is that describes of product does not need to be really large.

It does not need to be the most prominent thing on your package. It just needs to appear somewhere on the front of package. Another great example of this is if you ever go when you go shopping when you go grocery shopping, you will see foods that have these fanciful brand names. I think of a snack that I like.

Sun chips, sun chips are. I'm the chatter. Bye. Bye. They're the product name. They are the the thing that we know that it's almost like its own brand, but, and a product name. However, that is not actually the description of the product. If you were to look at that package, very small down near the bottom with the measurements is A very clear description, excuse me, a very clear description of what that product is in plain language, multigrain chip, that's not the name that the company wants to lead with because that's not exciting.

That's not enticing. So that's why I like to break out that product name and description of the product. You may have two different statements that identify your product, but if you're coming up with a fanciful name, which I love it helps you market the product. Usually, those fanciful names are much more memorable.

You just want to have a really clear description of the product in plain language, somewhere on the front of the package. All right. So that was number two and number three, number four, weight, size, quantity, and or piece count. This is the one that I think is easiest to overlook and easiest to format incorrectly, which is one of the reasons why I like to go through this because I want to make sure that.

You include this and you include it correctly because it's just, it's easier to do it right the first time. So the FPLA regulation states you must include the net quantity of contents in terms of weight measure or numerical count. And that these measurements must be in both metric and inch pound units.

That's where this gets tricky. So first in that statement, you have to figure out if your product should be listed in terms of weight. How much it weighs or what the oh, what the volume of it is. So when we're talking about a scented candle, like we talked about before, that's going to be in terms of weight volume.

If you're talking about a food product, that's going to be a weight. If we're talking about an item that is decor or, a piece of apparel that's actually measured and those are 2 different measurements, right? Apparel even gets gets a little little off-topic here. So let's say we're talking about a piece of decor or a kitchen item, a storage item.

You want the measurements like the length, width, and height or numerical count. The numerical count has to do with piece count. So let's say you've got a 30-piece set. One of the examples I like to use is my client's super trellis. They've got a modular plant trellis that you can put together. And that is a multi-piece set because you put it together.

There are all sorts of different pieces in the box and it can be configured in different ways. So it's not so much about the dimensions, although I believe we That's one where I would include both the dimensions and the piece count, but any time you have a product that has more than three pieces, you should be including that piece count on the front of a package and then also a contents list somewhere else on the package that just outlines what all the pieces are.

It could be something as simple as I'm thinking about. I just bought some paper plates. a camping weekend. And that might, have been a 50-pack of paper plates. Well, 50 paper plates, that's the quantity. And because they're all the same, we don't, we didn't, you wouldn't need to include a contents list.

But if it were say a a cutlery set, like a plastic cutlery set that you would, you would pick up at the same time and it comes with forks, knives, and spoons, you would say that this is a, let's see, a 33 piece. Set because I'm going to say that it's got 10 place settings, right? There are three pieces each and then somewhere else on the package, you would need to say 10 forks, 10 knives, 10 spoons.

So that's how you get into that numerical count. Going back to weight and measure, we talked about which one was weight and which one was measure. The other thing to note when it comes to weight and measure is that you do need to include both metrics. And the U.S. equivalents and when you put those on the package, they need to be next to each other or like in rows, top and bottom, and they need to be treated.

In the same way, so one of the most common mistakes I see is that you'll have a product. You'll have a measurement in inches and then and you'll bold that and then below in a smaller font weight and not bolded. You will have the centimeter equivalent, so you have the right information, but the formatting.

There would be no accuracy, in regards to these regulations. So to make it accurate, what you would do is you'd have your, you'd have your inches, and let's say we put them on the package in an 8-point font, and then directly below, we're going to put the centimeters. Those centimeters need to be in the same 8-point font.

So you just want them to be easy to read and not have any variation. Between the two. And that covers, that covers all of that. Now, if you're looking for an example of what this looks like I'm going to speak about it at the end of the show. I've got a great checklist that you can download that shows you exactly how to do this.

It's got We've got all sorts of information in there, but there is a one-pager specifically around these FPLA regulations. All right. And then number five in this list, company name and location. Now, wait a minute. First, we talked about the brand name. So how is this different? Well, Here's the thing.

Sometimes your company name might be different than your brand name. You might have a doing business as, but also you need to include not just the name, but the place of business. That is just so that customers if they're looking to get in touch with you, can figure out how to do that. Now, we can see that this is an old regulation because if this were a current regulation, instead of location, it might be something like a phone number, a website, or an email address.

But it's not, we have to have the location of the business on there. So the great thing is, is number five, the company name and location do not need to appear on the front of the package. This is actually something that I like to include as small text near the UPC barcode. Sometimes you have other information along with this as well, whether you have a copyright or a patent or some sort of other, you know, trademark or regulatory.

Information that you just want customers to know about. You just want to cover off by having it on your package by pairing it near the UPC barcode. It just makes it. Easy to find and gives it a home, essentially. So with this, what you want to include is you want to include the official name of your company.

So, you know, think about some of those things we see in the grocery store. I'll go back to my Sunchips example. Sunchips is the brand of chips, but it's not the company manufacturing the chips. I believe that company is General Mills. So in their company name and location, you would see that company name.

General Mills, and then you would see the location of their headquarters. For location, you need to include the city and state. If you are not in the US, you should include the country. And again, this doesn't need to be super prominent. You just want to have it somewhere on the package. So let's just recap.

That was, those are all five things you want to have on your package if you are selling products in the United States to be compliant with the FTC's Fair Packaging and Labeling Act. So let's just break this down real quick. There's a little reminder. You've got five things you need to include. Number one, your brand name and or logo number two, your product name number three, the description of the product.

If your product name is more fanciful or not a clear, plain language statement of the product. Number four, weight, size, quantity, and or piece count and number five, that last one company name and location. So. Really easy to cover off on all five of these things. Don't let the size and formatting requirements of number four with the weight, size, quantity, and or piece count trip you up.

You can definitely cover off on that. You can do it even if you are designing it yourself. And like I mentioned earlier if you want more insight on what you need. to include on your product packaging, please check out my free Ultimate Packaging Checklist. I've got a full page devoted to your FPLA compliance, but also it is filled with all of the steps and tasks you need to take your packaging from none to ensuring you include the right information.

There are even four product-specific Required information checklists for cosmetics, food, food and beverage, candles, and clothing. One of the reasons why I did those separate checklists is because what we just talked about here today, these are the five pieces of information every product package, regardless of product category, needs to include.

To be compliant with the FPLA. However, as we know, all sorts of different product categories have different requirements and cosmetics, food and beverage candles and clothing are some of the categories I get asked about the most. In fact, if you have questions about them, DM me on Instagram. Maybe we can do another episode on each of those specifically.

But in the meantime, you don't have to wait for that. You can go grab the checklist. The checklist is available at

It's free. All you have to do is jump on there, drop your name and your email, and you'll get it directly to your inbox. I hope that this helped. I hope this gives you a little insight into why you need to include this information. And I hope that we just kind of shed some light on how easy it is to make sure that your packaging is compliant with these regulations.

In Closing

Thank you for listening to product packaging and profit. A podcast for product entrepreneurs looking to level up with packaging. We hope you'll join us next time to hear more about how packaging can help propel profitable product businesses. If you enjoyed the show, please rate and review us wherever you're listening, and be sure to come back for our next episode.

Until then, this is Kelly Kempel of Hidden Path Creative. And don't forget what's on the outside matters too.

Thank you for listening to Product Packaging and Profit, a podcast for product entrepreneurs looking to level up with packaging.

We hope you'll join us next time to hear more about how packaging can help propel profitable product businesses. If you enjoyed the show, please rate and review us wherever you're listening, and be sure to come back next time. Until then, this is Kelly Kempel of Hidden Path Creative, and don't forget what's on the outside matters.