Printing & Packaging

Start Designing Your Bespoke Chocolate Packaging


For more than 15 years Hames Chocolates have been creating personalised packaging options for the chocolate and confectionery industry.

Our market expertise and knowledge allows us to create personalised chocolate packaging solutions and promotional chocolates in small and large volumes.

In the last few years we have invested in digital print solutions allowing us to print branded chocolate boxes, branded chocolate bars, branded Easter Eggs and branded advent calendars in house for fast turnaround on promotional chocolates and chocolate corporate gifts.

The digital print solutions alongside our cut and crease technology means we’re ideally placed for new product development.

Digital technology is ideal for orders that are smaller in volume as the set-up charges in more traditional print methods can kill a project before it gets started. Digital print means your logo can be printed in full colour which we refer to as CMYK. Most business chocolates are printed digitally. We also digitally print a lot of swing tags for branded chocolate lollipops and branded hot chocolate spoons.

A litho print is a more traditional and complex print method for carton board (card) or paper and we use this method to print larger volumes of bespoke chocolate packaging. A litho print is usually a higher quality print than a digital version but there are more costs involved. A full-colour CMYK Litho print involves creating four print plates for the print press (One plate each for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black). Litho print is also used if you require your logo to be exactly Pantone matched. If you require exact Pantone colours to be replicated then these are called spot colours. If you have a chocolate packaging design that is full colour but you wish for your logo to be Pantone matched then the Litho print may be CMYK plus one or two spot colours – this would then be classed as a six-colour print. Sometimes a customer asks us for a single colour print. This usually means they want a single Pantone colour printing on the packaging.

For a touch of luxury to your packaging, we can offer foil printed chocolate packaging. This is a process where foil often silver or gold is embossed over either a plain coloured box or over a printed design – foil is available in a wide range of colours but silver and gold foil is the most popular. Only one colour of foil can be printed at one time. We can foil print on plain chocolate boxes, digital printed chocolate boxes OR full-colour Litho printed boxes. Foil printing is sometimes called single colour printing by customers when they simply want a single colour logo printed on the chocolate packaging.

Hames also flow wrap branded chocolate bars, promotional chocolates and branded bags of sweets and chocolates. Printed flow wrap film and bagging film is personalised using a process called flexo printing. This is more complicated than printing on card or paper. The colours printed are spot colours rather CMYK. The colours are printed one at a time and the design needs to be respectful of the print process to get a good result. The cost of the printed film is based on the quantity printed at one time and the number of colours the customer would like printing. The food-contact film usually starts off clear or silver which means often a layer of white colour needs printing first. Flexo printed chocolate packaging usually involves a minimum order of more than 50kilo of film. It is possible to have chocolate flow wrap film and bagging film digitally printed but this is not as economical as flexo printing.

Branded chocolate foil used for Easter eggs and chocolate hearts are printed in a similar way to the branded flow wrap and branded bagging film above but use a process called Gravure printing. This uses a rotary print press and each colour ink is applied by its own cylinder and with drying steps in between. Again, there is a more expensive digital option but the minimum orders are much bigger than for digitally printed chocolate boxes and card products.

Bespoke chocolate trays are usually vacuum formed, we have created chocolate trays for a range of chocolate sizes and to hold different quantities of chocolates. We also carry a number of standard chocolate trays as stock items. Mostly we use and supply black chocolate trays as they are metal detectable and easily picked up by packaging sensors but we can also supply chocolate trays in clear or gold. Other chocolate trays that we offer are used for advent calendars and Easter eggs clams.

More recently we offer blisters for cake decorations such as chocolate cake domes. We also offer a range of printed cake boxes and patisserie boards.