8 Best Practices for a Modern Food Packaging Review & Approval Workflow

A complete guide to structuring your company’s label proofing and approval process to be quick, foolproof, and ensure no errors make it to print.

Packaging is one of the most important components of a food, beverage, or supplement product. A product’s packaging must communicate accurate nutrition facts panels, ingredient statements, allergen statements, claims, net weight, and more. All of these components, including even the layout, fonts, and sizes, have specific, regulated requirements. Errors can open up a company to the risk of lawsuits, damage to the brand’s reputation, and costly reprints or recalls.

Because of this, a clear and efficient packaging review and approval workflow is essential. However, many organizations still rely on fragmented tools, long email threads, and manual processes that create unnecessary risk.

This guide outlines 8 best practices to help food, beverage, and supplement companies create more accurate, traceable, and compliant review and approval workflows from start to finish.

1. Define your Proofing Team
2. Create a Standard Process
3. Develop a Clear Checklist for Reviews
4. Centralize the Workflow
5. Define Deadlines
6. Collaborate and Communicate
7. Keep Accurate Records
8. Follow the Feedback Loop

1. Define your Proofing Team

Identify every stakeholder who needs to participate in the review process, and clarify who has final approval authority. Whether your organization has a team of 15 or 1,500, clearly defining your review team upfront keeps everyone aligned and ensures no critical reviewer is overlooked.

Food packaging review teams often include members from:

• Branding and Marketing
• Packaging and Design
• Regulatory Affairs
• Legal
• Quality Assurance
• Operations or Supply Chain

When teams understand their roles and responsibilities early, the entire process becomes more predictable and efficient.

2. Develop a Clear Checklist for Reviews

Define the specific components that must be checked for accuracy, and determine whether any team member can review each item or requires a specialized reviewer.

Many companies create role-based checklists. For example:

• Branding reviews color accuracy, layout, and graphic elements
• Regulatory reviews claims, statements, and regulated formatting

Using a tool like ENTR to store templates for these checklists ensures consistency between projects and helps teams move faster with fewer mistakes.

3. Create a Standard Process

Once your team and checklists are defined, document a standardized workflow. This often includes:

• Defining project timelines
• Collecting a standard set of supporting documentation required before review begins
• An initial review with a smaller set of stakeholders before a broader stakeholder review
• Defined approval and escalation sequences

What matters most is that your process clearly outlines the information, roles, requirements, and timeline needed for a smooth and effective review.

4. Centralize the Workflow

After your process is established, centralizing all communication, checklists, comments, files, and approvals in one location is essential.

Centralization helps teams:

• Stay organized
• Avoid duplicative or conflicting feedback
• Reduce email overload
• Minimize risk of errors making it to print
• Ensure complete traceability

A single source of truth is one of the strongest safeguards your label review process can have.

5. Define Deadlines

Every packaging artwork review should include clear deadlines for individual reviewers and for final sign-off. Managing dozens of tasks and reminders across multiple teams can quickly become overwhelming.

Automated tools, like ENTR, make deadline management significantly easier by:

• Setting due dates for each review task
• Sending automatic reminders directly to reviewers
• Notifying stakeholders when tasks are overdue

Automation keeps teams on track and ensures time-sensitive projects don’t get delayed.

6. Collaborate and Communicate

Centralized collaboration eliminates the chaos of feedback and files scattered across emails, PDFs, or messaging threads. Tools that allow reviewers to pin comments directly onto the packaging file, tag team members to ask questions, and discuss revisions in a single thread make the entire process faster and more transparent.

Real-time collaboration shortens review cycles, reduces misunderstandings, and gets your final file approved more efficiently.

7. Keep Accurate Records‍

Documentation is one of the most important parts of a packaging approval workflow. Every version of an artwork file, every revision, every reviewer comment, and every approval should be stored in a traceable, audit-ready format.

Accurate records:

• Protect your company during regulatory reviews
• Provide visibility into how decisions were made
• Reduce duplicated work
• Enhance accountability
• Ensure your team always works from the latest version

Using a system that automatically logs and stores this information ensures nothing gets lost, and your company always has a trusted source of truth.

8. Follow the Feedback Loop

After the review and approval cycle is complete, closing the loop is a critical final step. This means confirming that all feedback has been addressed, ensuring the final file matches the approved version, and communicating project closure to all stakeholders. It also involves capturing learnings from the process: Were there bottlenecks? Were certain steps unclear? Did any errors almost slip through?

Taking time to evaluate each review project helps the process continuously improve. Over time, these improvements strengthen your overall workflow, reduce review cycle times, and decrease the risk of future errors. An effective feedback loop transforms your packaging review process from a static checklist into a living, evolving system that gets better with every iteration.

How can ENTR help? 

Modern packaging workflows require clarity, structure, and the right tools. ENTR brings your formula, ingredient, and nutrition data, regulatory requirements, artwork files, and approvals into one connected platform. If you're ready to streamline your label proofing process and reduce risk, ENTR can help.

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