Hey guys, today we're gonna discuss packaging and what is the best route to go when you're starting your food business? What is the best way to save money and what looks really good? Today on Marketing Food Online. All right, it's Damian from Marketing Food Online and I want to get in today's episode discussing packaging. Different types of bags that you can get either made for you or you can simply make yourself. Now, there's going to be a lot of variables and factors that come into play with this and one of the biggest ones is gonna be your budget. Obviously if you're just starting a food business, you don't have an enormous amount of money to get this type of a packaging made, which is completely understandable. This is Uncle Ben's Rice, which is put out by a very large company, Mars, and Mars has the money to produce these types of packaging. Well, you probably don't have that type of budget and you're not making hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions of dollars a year and that's perfectly fine. Because when you first start out, you want to go with something super simple and to be quite honest with you, I highly recommend something that you can actually make yourself. Now, there are different types of guidelines for packaging labels when you put certain information on these labels and sometimes you can actually get away with applying for an FDA exemption, which does not make you actually have to put all of the additional information like nutritional analysis and such. If you've got one that has the basic ingredients, it has your address, and it has your allergen, your net weight, and if you've got an item number, if you happen to be selling at a certain online shop or if you're on a certain platform online and you have an items number, that's fine as well. I'm gonna show you this bag. This is a bag of a product that we make. It's just a basic sprinkle. It's a candy sprinkle. This is the logo of the product here. This is our candy logo. And this is a very small bag. This is only a few inches in height so it's very small. But on the front, we try to minimize the usage of a large label for a couple of reasons. I'm a big believer in allowing the customer to see the product and to see it as much as possible. The other thing is that this is much more inexpensive than trying to get a company to produce this for you. Now this can be made for you. Super nice, great graphics. It's a fully printed surface. This is actually printed on the surface of the bag. It is not considered to be a label. So it's actually part of the bag itself. Now there are companies that can make these for you. I've already checked around for the past few years and normally their minimums are between 500 to 1,000 units on the low side. This type of bag, though, will cost you probably in production at that small of a run, because believe it or not, 500 units to 1,000 is considered really small, this could cost you anywhere from about $1.30 to about $3 and up a bag. Yes, that's how much this would cost you. Now, is that cost effective for your product? Probably not. Because if the bag itself is costing you over $1, at least $1, then the product inside, depending upon what the product is, your cost for this type of product, which is again very small, it could be around $4 to even $5. What would you retail that for? There's no way to make a margin. So this is out of the question for start-ups. Now, the next one to go is something like this. This is Wilton. Wilton is a huge producer of baked good products, baked good supplies, right? They have these bags, which Wilton is a multi-billion dollar business. They have a variety of products. I think it's thousands and thousands of products to be quite honest with you. But this is a product that is a melting chip. It's a red melting chip chocolate but the bag is very cheap. This retails in a store for about $2-3 a bag. Now of course, again, the size of your company's gonna dictate the type of budget that you have. These chocolates probably cost a few pennies for Wilton to make in the bulk, in mass production, very little. This bag, which has a peg hook on the top right here, a little hole, these types of bags, you can have done for yourself, which is different than the one I just threw on the floor. This one is very inexpensive. You could probably get this, honestly, with some basic graphics and a window, window here for your product to be visible in the bottom in there. My opinion, super important when it comes to food products if it's granolas, nuts, whatever it may be. So try to have some type of packaging that can visually show the product to the customer. There are some bags that are completely covered, like the Uncle Ben's Rice that's on the floor. But everybody knows what rice looks like. This is a specialty type of product. This is a colored chocolate chip. So with that being said, let me adjust this really quick, with that being said, what you can get done for you is anywhere from about 35 to 65 cents a bag. Now that's kind of a little bit more reasonable if you wanted to go this route. You got a nice graphic. You got the name of the product. You got your net weight. On the back, you can give nutritional information. But this is all black text over a white background. The more intricate that you get, the more color, the more vibrant the colors, you're costing yourself more money. So this is another route to go but it's only gonna be, like I said, 30 to 50 cents to get this done. And you can probably get this done in about 500 to 1,000 units. This serves two purposes. This can be set on a shelf or it can be hung on a peg. It's called a peg hook. Retail stores love these. There's a lot of ways they can merchandise this on their shelves. Next, so this one here is from a company called nuts.com. It is fantastic. I love this company, I love their entire culture, I love the way that the company's set up, I love the variety of products they have, and I also love their packaging. Very original and very simple. It's in the back, completely enclosed. It's got a nice little nutritional label. It's got the ingredients, the website address, all of the contact info. But on the front, it has just enough space to show the product. That is a wonderful idea. All of their bags come like this. Now this is a solid colored bag with a little window in the front. You can have this type of a bag done for you as well. Keep in mind that normally it's gonna a minimum of 500 to 1,000 units. Sometimes you'll find companies that are looking to take on smaller start-ups like yourself and they may do a couple hundred to 500 as a minimum, 200 to 300 to 500. They would cost you, my guestimation based on what I've seen online for the past few years, this would be probably in about a 60 cents to maybe $1, maybe 90 cents a bag for that sized run. If you're buying 50,000 or 60,000 of these, that price would obviously change. So lastly, let's look at, I think I just broke that open, this bag. Like I said, when I first started, this is the one that we use and this is how we do it. So you've got a very simple bag. This is a five mil polypropylene bag. By the way, there's different types of bags with different thicknesses for different reasons. This bag will actually keep out moisture, keeps out oxygen and air from the product to keep it fresh. We heat-seal these so you get a nice seal on the top and you have a tear strip. All those bags that I just through on the floor also have tear strips. Those are called tear strips. Once the customer can open this, they can reseal it. This costs me only about 15 cents for the whole thing. Not just the bag but the label and the other label on the back. Now, we do have products that have nutritional labels and we do have all of that stuff too. I'd have to find you one around here and should do that on a separate video. But this type of bag and packaging is probably your best route to go when you first start. Obviously if you're making salsas and you're watching this and you're thinking well, I don't put salsa in a bag, I understand that. There are other ways to obviously package salsa, which would be in a bottle or a jar and I'll do a separate video about that too to show you some of the more inexpensive ways to package your product when you're first starting when it comes to liquid products. But if you're doing something dry, I just wanted to do this video to show you the variety of packaging and how easy it is to get a pretty decent-looking package. Very simple. You can get this at the stores. Our brittle that we had in the eight or nine Fresh Markets, I lost track, Fresh Markets that we had in our area, we actually had a bag very similar to this and it worked very well. The label was a little bit more egg-shaped, a little bit more oblong, and then on the back, we had our nutritional label and all that stuff and the barcode. But we made that bag for pennies, pennies on the dollar. So when it comes to packaging, you don't have to overthink it. Don't think that you have to have those pretty, fancy bags. You don't. If you want to make yourself a label, and, again, this is a smaller version, if you want to make yourself a rectangular label like this with a fancy logo similar to that, you can do that on the front. But my opinion, I would give you some tips on how to make your product more appealing when you're new to the market and you want to get attention visually, get attention from the customer. If this sits on a shelf, people can see it. They know exactly what it is. If it's completely covered up and it's a new product and you have a label, it could work. I'm not saying it doesn't. But I recommend sticking yourself out on the shelf and making yourself more visible with this type of packaging. So I'll wrap it up. I wanted to keep it super short and sweet but I wanted to definitely go over some of those different types of bags and I have to clean up the mess on the floor now. And if you guys liked this video, as always, please do give me a big thumbs up. I appreciate it. And I hope the information was truly helpful and you can understand the pricing and the types of bags that you can get but think about the types of bag that you really need to get when you first start your food business. So, I'll--