The new EU regulation No1169/2011 comes into force on 13 December (with a second deadline of December 2016 for changes to nutritional information) and involves new requirements in terms of the amount of information and the minimum type size.
Major brands, such as Marks & Spencer, have been planning for the changes and the likely affect on packaging and label designs, which has led to a backlog of design work in the packaging supply chain.
Mike Golding, managing director of Telford-based flexible packaging printer TCL Packaging said the firm, which has invested around £2m in a new factory and machinery in the past 12 months, is working 24/7 to help customers meet the deadline.
"Most supermarkets and food manufacturers do a range refresh every couple of years, so in many cases they've delayed a refresh because they knew they were going to have to change the design at the end of this year to meet the new regulations," added Golding.
"We're doing a bunch of range refreshes at the moment that we wouldn't normally do this time of year and because a lot of this is being done now it's created a backlog in the design and repro agencies - we've got work that needs printing by the start of December that we don't have the artwork for yet."
John Corrall, managing director at Cambridge-based Industrial Inkjet Systems (IIJ), has warned that many printers and packers are effectively "in the dark" about the likely impact of the regulations.
IIJ believes it could result in a requirement for previously long runs of standardised packs to be broken down into shorter runs containing the mandated information in different languages.
IIJ is the inkjet sales arm of Konica Minolta, and has been involved in a development projects with one confectionery company that looked into adding equipment to do the necessary overprinting itself, but then abandoned the idea.
"Even though this global brand purchased trial equipment it didn't really progress beyond that, which I take to mean that when the new regulations come in from December the problem falls on the shoulders of the current external suppliers," said Corrall.
"My feeling is that food companies regard it as somebody else's problem, so printers and packers and others in the supply chain are going to be in for a nasty shock."
John Bambery, chairman of the BPIF Labels special interest group, added: "Countless artwork has to be changed to meet the deadline in December. My take is that the only way of doing it cost effectively is digitally, which creates a massive business opportunity for those with digital equipment."
However, Golding was dismissive of the idea that the directive could result in a sudden shift to digital. "Some big volume chocolate suppliers do try to put 10 different language versions on a pack and maybe they will have to reduce that to six, but that just means a run is 75m miles instead 100m miles," he said.
"Digital run lengths allegedly work somewhere around 1,000m; one day digital will take a percentage of the market but it won't be today and when it does it will be single digit."
