Printing Food Labels From Kitchen Control

What Print Label does

Every ingredient, prepared yield and recipe in Kitchen Control can be turned into a printed food label — the kind you'd stick on a prepped sauce, a batch of dough, a tub of ice cream or a tray of bakes going out prepacked. Open any item's own page and there's a Print Label button; from there it takes about ten seconds to produce a label with:

• The item name and its allergens, pulled automatically from the ingredient record — not retyped
• A shelf life you set once on the item (or type in on the spot for a one-off batch) that calculates the Use By date for you
• Day of production, so it's clear when the label was actually made
• Optional Made By and Batch Code fields, for traceability
• Any free-text notes that need to go on the label

The label is designed for a 62mm continuous label roll and prints in landscape — 100mm wide, 62mm tall — which is the standard layout for the small food-safety labels used on trays, tubs and prepped containers.

Printing labels — no permission needed

Anyone on the team can open an item and print its label, whatever their role. Only editing the underlying recipe, ingredient or yield is restricted to Owner, Head Chef and Sous Chef — printing a label for something that's already set up isn't an edit, so it's never gated behind a permission a busy kitchen doesn't have time to chase down.

Do you need a specific printer?

Print Label works through your browser's own print dialog, so technically it'll send a job to whatever printer is set up on the device. In practice, for it to come out the right size and shape — a proper small food label rather than a portion of an A4 sheet — you want a dedicated continuous-roll label printer. That's a small, separate category of printer built exactly for this: till receipts, shipping labels, and food labels all use the same kind of hardware.

Which printer to buy

We tested Print Label against the Brother QL range, which is the standard choice for small food and retail labels in the UK. Two models cover almost every kitchen's needs, and both are officially supported on ChromeOS as well as Mac and Windows — not every model in the range is, so it's worth checking before buying elsewhere.

Both take Brother's standard DK continuous label rolls — a 62mm roll matches what Print Label is designed for. Genuine Brother DK tape is worth paying for over third-party compatible rolls; several UK wholesalers stock compatible tape that's noticeably cheaper but isn't the real thing, which is a false economy if it jams or the adhesive doesn't hold in a chiller.

Where to buy

Brother QL printers are available from most major UK electronics and office suppliers, as well as trade hardware wholesalers who can also set up direct shipping to your own customers without their own branded paperwork, if that matters for your business.