Slightly off-topic: ND's Labels -- can you please make them matte?

We have discussed this for a long time. Our labels are currently printed in-house on UV coated label stock. How that works is that the ink is shot down on top of a polymer label that has a UV coating on top of it. It uses dye ink to give more vibrant colors. However, the UV coating can get sticky if it gets wet. It's something that has annoyed me for a long time, too. You are not alone in that sentiment. It's just a difficult thing to fix without insanely complicated printing press machines.

How most printing is done is using large printing presses. Ink is put down onto uncoated label stock in a roll, and then the labels are laminated right afterwards. This lamination step is what puts a seal over the top of the ink. This is how most of the labels you handle are done. They are done in large quantities ahead of time, and kept in big rolls that are used in the production process. This doesn't give you the ability to change things on the fly, though. This is how we did it on Ceretropic in the beginning. We would use a printing company to make rolls of labels for each product, and then we would have those on hand to label the product as we made them. The issue is that if anything needed to be changed, you needed to completely scrap whatever label stock you had already printed, then send a whole new print run to the printer and wait for them to get it back to you. It's slow and not suited to making changes quickly, or having variable data on the labels like lot numbers. You waste a lot more labels, and you have to put lot numbers on the bottles in a different way, like with a laser printer that puts it on the plastic bottle itself. We do that for Natrium stuff, so it is possible. It's just a lot more difficult with Nootropics Depot, because we have so many different products. We need to be agile. If a batch is not flowing as well over the encapsulation machines, and we need to use a different excipient, that's no problem. We print the labels just before a lot is staged for production. If a batch comes in more fluffy that usual, and we need to go up a size in jar for that run, not a big deal. We adjust the label and print right before production for the larger jar. These are things we deal with every week, due to the size of our catalog. Flexibility and agility are needed on the ND side of things.

So where does that leave us? Well we need to absolutely print ND labels in-house. There's just no way we could make the pre-printing of large label runs ahead of time work for all of ND products. Right now we do that with dye ink on polymer labels with UV coating. This gives the best color. If we wanted to get away from the stickiness, we would have to move away from polymer and UV coating to a matte paper label. Those don't look nearly as nice, plus they tear easier and are harder to work with. There is another option in moving towards pigment based inks instead of dye based inks. We have investigated that a bit, and it might be something we do. Pigment based inks are just not as vibrant in color, nor are they as fade-resistant. However, it is an option. The more complex, but better, option is to move to a printing press of our own. This would allow us to print using dye based inks, then laminate the labels ourselves. This would give us the best of both worlds, as we could continue to use dye based inks on a polymer label, but then seal it all with a UV protecting lamination layer. This is just a much more complex process with a massively bigger printing machine. There are some other technologies that might be possible, too. I am investigating them all.

Moral of the story, I feel you. It annoys me too. It's annoyed me for years. I am just trying to solve the issue without screwing our process up too much, while also keeping the color saturation at an acceptable level. I will get it accomplished, though. Believe me.