🖨 Over the past two weeks, we’ve been talking to the head of the Department of Printing at the Technical University of Mining and Metallurgy.
He explained to us how printers work, how printing is carried out in most places across the country, what the regulations are in theory and in practice, and all sorts of other crucial things about turning us into a business that prints on napkins. His advice was: look into this Colop E-Mark printer, see what people who use it are saying, and if the reviews are good – go for it. It is possible to use it with a different ink, but it won’t be cheap or quick. Its current ink is water-based and, although it isn’t specifically designed for food packaging, from a chemical point of view it’s fine, even if there’s slight contact with food.
🍽 Then the Bulgarian Food Safety Agency (BFSA) sent us the long-awaited reply:
In cases where paper products, including cocktail napkins, are clearly intended solely for decorative, advertising or other purposes unrelated to food contact, and under normal and foreseeable conditions of use are not expected to come into contact with food, they do not fall within the scope of Regulation (EC) No 1935/2004.
In other words: state that it is not a dining napkin and go ahead with printing.
This means we have two variants of Lafetki:
For dining: 16.5/16.5 cm, printed by VSP Group using inks suitable for food packaging
For bars: 6.5/6.5 cm, printed by us using Colop, which are for wiping up spilled drinks and tears, not for putting your slice of pizza on. They’ll also work for wiping crisps and nuts off your fingers.
We’ve ordered 200 packs of Lafetki Icebreakers for food, which will go into production next week. We’re currently awaiting quotes for packaging and napkins for the Lafetki bar version, so we can work out the business model. Here’s a bit of a joke – they rang us today to say we don’t have a quote yet, because they’ve never made packaging smaller than 10/10 cm before and are trying to work out how to do it. 😅
Our Lafetki are constantly pushing the industry to innovate!
Enjoy the summer, because we’re planning to enjoy it too – more storks, waves, watermelon and sunsets, and less time in front of a screen. Amen.
Thank you for your support and trust 🙏