Four Ways Food and Beverage Manufacturers Can Transform Their Product Packaging Today

By Troy Walker

Operating in a fast-paced industry that’s heavily regulated, very competitive, and evolving at a rapid pace, food and beverage companies have to keep up with changing consumer behaviors, leverage new opportunities, and respond quickly. This level of agility is getting harder and harder to reach using manual processes and legacy solutions that were put in place years—or even decades—ago.

Product labeling is one process that’s ripe for change at the typical food and beverage company. Especially those looking to optimize man hours, improve throughput, and reduce time to market. Unfortunately, even though “digital transformation” is all the rage these days, many companies are still using outdated, time-consuming manual processes when it comes to Artwork Management. These companies are emailing PDFs, doing FTP file drops, and using other hands-on means of designing and updating their product labels.

This is a major oversight in an industry where consumer demand for a wider variety of food and beverage options—gluten-free, low-fat, no added sugar, etc.—leads to high levels of stock keeping unit (SKU) proliferation and product labeling variability. The right packaging artwork also helps companies communicate their brand, adhere to regulatory requirements, and influence buying decisions.

The recipe for success – transform your packaging artwork process today!

For food and beverage manufacturers, the artwork surrounding a product is just as valuable and important as the product itself. Delays in delivering accurate and approved packaging artwork have an increasing impact on time to market and a company’s bottom line. With new marketing trends, growing competition, and an ever-increasing flow of information forcing food and beverage companies to move and react faster, implementing a cloud-based Artwork Management platform provides significant value.

With a configurable, digitized solution in place, food and beverage companies can easily manage packaging artwork and the related end-to-end business processes with complete access and full transparency. They can also streamline the packaging concept-to-shelf process, lower their costs, improve control and regulatory compliance, significantly decrease complexity, and reduce time to market in today’s competitive business world.

Read on for four benefits of adopting a modern cloud-based Artwork Management solution.

#1 Digitized custom workflows. By adopting a digital and configurable Artwork Management solution, organizations can eliminate the pain that comes with managing volumes of spreadsheets, excessive review cycles, and input from dozens of stakeholders.

#2 Improved visibility and fast-tracked approvals. A modern Artwork Management solution gives all stakeholders involved in the packaging artwork approval process visibility of their required tasks and deadlines. This allows them to review, compare, and annotate in real time to reduce turnaround and improve speed to market. This also improves the accuracy and reliability of the proofing process.

#3 Expanded collaboration with version control. With its collaborative capabilities, a digitized Artwork Management platform helps on-site employees, remote team members, and external stakeholders log in and manage their part of the project without someone having to “babysit” the process. Additionally, it provides an accurate version history to ensure that team members are working on the right version of the artwork.

#4 Better control over content. By digitizing their Artwork Management, food and beverage companies can store all their master content in a central repository for future use by designers, marketing departments, printers, and others. That means no more going back and searching through Microsoft Office files to find the resources needed to add information to a nutrition panel, add text to a label, or change the address of a manufacturing site.

You can learn more about how the cloud can transform your product packaging in this recent Loftware report: https://resources.loftware.com/Artwork-Management-Recipe-For-Success.html