Serious question: why are print buyers holding disposable FMCG packaging to a higher standard than their reference: their copy of the Pantone color guide? Why would consumers – who are not color savvy, typically looking less than 2 seconds at a package in a challenging environment before buying – not trust packages with a slight color variation, while print buyers – who are color savvy and are paid to critically look at color, in a perfect and flat world – embrace color deviations in their favorite tool without any question, without even checking it? And this is really a serious question, not even a 1 million EUR/USD question, but probably closer to a 1 billion EUR/USD per year question, with perfectly usable print jobs being rejected and discarded unused. This needs to end.
CONTENTS: Consumers trust | Pantone’s ambiguous messaging is a liability | Single digits, on the lower side | Proven inconsistencies | An exact match? | Why is this important?
It’s a narrative you can read on LinkedIn at least once a week: “consumers won’t trust a brand if the FMCG packages have a slight color shift”. Always without any proof that this is the case, BTW. The only ‘proof’ that I’ve seen is that (in)famous quote that color enhances brand recognition by (up to) 80%. Which is NOT about color consistency but about the use of color versus black-and-white in newspaper advertising. But this quote has already been abused by people selling color-related services for a few decades as justification for their services. When I contacted the person who, as far as I could retrieve, was the first to link that (in)famous quote to small color deviations in print, to know how she established that link, she never replied. I’ve written a long article on that one many years ago.
But what we rarely see are complaints about the inconsistencies in different versions of the Pantone color guides. If there are complaints, they are always from the printing industry, never from designers, brand owners, or print buyers. Which makes me wonder: if color deviations are lethal for trust in a brand or product, why haven’t they ditched Pantone guides as their reference yet? Why are many still using THEIR current copy as the reference? Even if their current copy is different from their previous version?
You may have already seen this image; I’ve shared it many times. Someone published it on LinkedIn, right after the launch of the 2023 version (the one with the new recipes). For the record: both of the guides in the picture were within warranty, what you see is NOT the result of aging. There are inconsistencies between different batches of Pantone color guides.
But even within the same batch, there are inconsistencies… More on that later.
Pantone’s ambiguous messaging is a liability
If you are from the printing industry, I can hear you say: “But the physical color guides are not the reference; the digital master data is the reference!!!”
Well… that’s the official story, the one that Pantone tells the printing and converting industry, the color geeks. E.g. during a presentation at the Color 20 conference (see below).
But that’s NOT what Pantone tells that other market: the designers, brand owners, and print buyers. Towards that customer group, the messaging is as follows (from the Pantone website,d.d. 02/05/2026, bold and underlining are mine).
In the introduction, the following is mentioned: “(…) Compact, handheld fan decks provide easy, on-the-go physical references for the actual appearance of Pantone Colors in digital design applications, (…)”
And the features section lists, among others, these two:
- Portable, handheld fan decks provide easy on-the-go reference
- Versatile end-to-end tool for everything from design inspiration to press check
This is very ambiguous messaging from Pantone, costing printing companies a lot of money. For no reason.
Single digits, on the lower side
Let me share a concrete example: a mid-sized printing company (around 50 people) that had a discussion with one of an important customer. They had to print 100.000 high end packages, one spot color. They received the Pantone number from their customer and asked their ink supplier to mix the ink according to the Pantone recipe. What could go wrong? They did everything according to the book.
But when the packages were delivered, the customer immediately complained and rejected the order. It didn’t look like that Pantone color in THEIR color guide. It was a near-neutral that had shifted a bit between two editions of the Pantone color guide… The printing company had the latest one, and the customer had an older one. The ink vendor used the digital ‘master data’ for ink mixing. But, as usual, it’s the printing company that got blamed.
The customer forced the printing company to reprint that job. And here’s the thing that is never highlighted: do you, do print buyers and brand owners, have any idea about the financial consequences? E.g., any idea about the cost of the substrate when we’re dealing with FMCG packaging? When printing on cardboard, that can easily be around 50% of the total cost, with high-end packaging (special substrates) probably more. In case of a reprint, the unused original packaging is just discarded without ever being used. It’s pure waste.
And do you, do print buyers and brand owners have any idea about the profit margin of printing companies? This is also rarely covered. I checked it based on public balance sheets of printing companies, and it’s usually a single-digit net profit margin operating profit margin (corrected 15/05/2026). And on average, even on the lower side of that single digit, if it’s not negative: over 25% has a negative net profit margin operating profit margin.
Now imagine how many profitable jobs the printing company needs to run to cover the cost of the substrate of that rejected job…
Proven inconsistencies
One of my LinkedIn friends is Gary Courtney from DagwoodLinnetts, a high-end shop for mock-ups and pre-production proofing. He buys new Pantone guides every year, not just one, but 10 copies, every time. Because many people in his shop are using these. So, I asked him a few years ago to measure a few patches across those different copies, to check the deviation from the digital master and the variation within the different copies. The graph below is a summary of that exercise for the popular Blue 072C: a comparison of 7 of his guides (the other 3 were unavailable at that moment) with the digital master value, showing that all are above 2 dE00. And remember: it’s that digital value that will serve as the reference for an ink manufacturer when he needs to mix a specific quantity of a spot color ink…
But also the variation within that batch, which was up to almost 1 dE00…
Another friend on LinkedIn, Hauke Lieferink from ACME Graphics, did an interesting exercise. Kind of a fun exercise, but one with serious consequences: he measured several patches in his color guide and asked his spectrophotometer to identify the closest Pantone color. In a perfect world, that should be the same Pantone number he measured, but that was not the case… [sigh]
So we have a reference that is far from perfect, but designers, print buyers, and brand owners embrace this without any discussion, without even checking it, even though it’s their trusted reference. They will use it over and over again. But an FMCG package that is only slightly off would be fatal for consumer confidence? Really???
And let’s not forget that it’s only inside the print bubble that people spend a lot of time looking very closely at colors and color deviations, and this only in a flat plain, with perfect lighting. Which is very different from the consumer experience: shopping is done in a non-flat environment, with lighting that can influence color perception significantly (think about shadows), in a time frame that is much shorter than color evaluation during a press check (eye-tracking has shown that the ‘total fixation duration’ is less than 2 seconds, for Coca-Cola only one tenth of a second), and our brain is lazy and only needs a limited amount of boxes ticked to retrieve and grab a product.
BTW: this survey on brand loyalty has some interesting insights… One of the questions was in which situations participants would buy another brand than their favorite one. Promotions and out-of-stock conditions were the two main reasons. ‘Looking a bit different’ wasn’t really an issue. And remember: a slightly different color is a subset of ‘looking a bit different’.
Interesting anecdote: I asked this same question during a FOGRA Colour Management Café a few years ago, with only people from the printing industry in the audience. And guess what, nobody considered ‘looking a bit different’ a reason to buy another brand. Not even the people from X-Rite/Pantone that were attending that session… Think about that.
An exact match?
Dear designers, brand owners, print buyers: if you need an exact match with the color you saw in your copy of the Pantone color guide, there is only one way to communicate that color: measure it and share that measured color with everyone involved. If you share the Pantone number, all involved in printing and converting will rely on the Pantone master data, which can look different from the color you saw with your own eyes.
To make that very concrete: the image below shows on the left the 072C that Gary Courtney measured in one of his Pantone color guides, the color on the right is the ‘official’ color, the master data for that 072C… These look different.
Measuring the color you see and using that measurement as the primary brand color definition, that’s the way Project BBCG – A Better Brand Color Guide promotes.
But even then, be cautious that your expectations are realistic! The Pantone color guides are printed on a special paper. If you are printing on a different paper, the results may differ. Check the image below: the same ink, the same amount, but on different paper types. If your brand color is printed on a brown corrugated box, without a white base layer, it will look quite different than the color in your Pantone color guide. And that’s not the printer’s fault.
Why is this important?
No other industry, not any field of science, would accept a practice where the variations in the reference are higher than the products that are based on that – clearly flawed – reference. But in printing, it’s common. With serious financial consequences for printing and converting companies. That needs to end.
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