Coles packaging and artwork requirements: the complete guide

The three gates a pack has to pass

It helps to think of Coles as three separate customers who happen to share a logo. Each one checks a different thing, and a pack that delights one can be rejected by another.

• The category buyer. Decides whether the product earns a slot at range review. Looks at the pack the way a shopper does: category, price point, difference from what is already there. This is the commercial gate.
• Compliance and quality. Checks that the consumer unit is legal under the Food Standards Code and trade measurement law, that mandatory information is legible, and that Coles Own Brand artwork follows the Coles brand guidelines. This is the legal gate.
• The distribution centre. Checks that cartons and pallets carry the right barcodes and labels, sit within weight limits, and move through the DC without being handled twice. This is the logistics gate, and it is where most first-time suppliers stumble.

The documents that govern it

Coles keeps its standards on Coles Supplier Central. You need a supplier login, which means either an existing trading relationship or an accepted application. The documents a packaging project needs are:

Coles also publishes public-facing material on sustainable packaging and on how to become a supplier. Those are the starting point if you do not yet have a login.

The consumer unit: what has to be on the pack

Coles does not write its own food labelling law. It enforces the national one. Before any Coles-specific requirement, the pack has to meet the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, the Country of Origin Food Labelling Information Standard and the National Trade Measurement Regulations. In practice that means:

• Name of the food, and a description if the name does not make the nature of the product clear.
• Ingredient list in descending order of ingoing weight, with allergens declared in bold, in the ingredient list and in a separate contains statement, using the required plain English names.
• Nutrition information panel in the prescribed format, per serve and per 100 g or 100 mL.
• Date marking: best before or use by, in the required form.
• Name and Australian address of the supplier.
• Lot identification.
• Country of origin: the standard mark with the kangaroo and bar chart for food grown, produced or made in Australia, or the required text for imported food.
• Net quantity in metric, in the size and position required by trade measurement law.
• Storage and use directions where the safety of the food depends on them.
• Health Star Rating where used. It is voluntary at the time of writing, but ministers agreed in February 2026 to begin the process of making it mandatory, so design the front of pack to accommodate it now.

Legibility is a requirement in its own right. Standard 1.2.9 of the Code requires mandatory information to be legible, prominent and in English, in a colour that contrasts distinctly with the background. Warning statements have a minimum type size. This is the point where good design and compliance meet: a beautiful pack with a grey-on-cream ingredient list is a non-compliant pack.

Barcodes on the consumer unit

The retail barcode is an EAN-13 carrying a GS1 GTIN registered to your company through GS1 Australia. Coles will not accept a number you have made up or bought from a reseller. Three things matter on the artwork:

• Size. Print the symbol at or above the GS1 minimum magnification. Truncating the height to fit a design is the single most common cause of scan failure at the checkout.
• Quiet zones. The light margins to the left and right of the bars are part of the symbol. Design elements that intrude on them will stop the scan.
• Contrast. Dark bars on a light background. Red bars, metallic substrates and bars printed over a busy image are all readable to a human and invisible to a scanner.

Get a barcode verification report from GS1 Australia or an accredited verifier before the pack goes to print, not after. Coles and Woolworths both treat a verification grade as evidence; a supplier who cannot produce one is asked to go and get one.

Shelf-ready packaging: the five easies

Shelf-ready packaging, or SRP, is the outer that goes straight onto the shelf with the consumer units still inside. Coles has pushed it hard because it cuts replenishment time. Coles and Woolworths both frame their SRP standards around the industry's five easies:

1. Easy to identify. The store team can tell what is in the case from the aisle, without opening it. Product name, variant and count on at least two faces.
2. Easy to open. One motion, no knife, no tearing the consumer units. Perforations that actually perforate.
3. Easy to shelve. The tray fits the shelf depth and lets the store stack it as the planogram intends. Coles stacks trade units two deep, so the tray has to work in that arrangement.
4. Easy to shop. The consumer can see and reach the product. The tray does not hide the front of pack or make the last unit hard to get out.
5. Easy to dispose. The empty tray flattens and goes into the store's cardboard recycling without separating materials.

The trade unit must not exceed the safe lifting weight in the Supply Standards. Ten kilograms is the figure most suppliers design to. Heavier cases are handled as exceptions and are a reason for rejection.

Cartons and pallets: the DC gate

The distribution centre is automated and unforgiving. Everything it needs is in the Common Delivery Guidelines and the Coles Carton Logistic Labelling Requirements. The essentials:

• Every outer carton carries a GTIN in the right symbology. ITF-14 on cartons, GS1-128 on logistics labels. A retail EAN-13 on the outside of a carton is a mistake that gets a delivery held.
• Logistics labels sit in the position the Coles requirements specify, with the human-readable and barcode information laid out to GS1 standard.
• Pallets are the Australian standard footprint, in good condition, wrapped and stable, with pallet labels on two adjacent sides.
• Cartons are robust enough to survive the DC without crushing, and easy to open at store level.

The Common Delivery Guidelines exist so that a supplier can specify one carton and one pallet configuration for both major retailers. Use them. Building to one retailer's spec and hoping the other accepts it is how you end up with two carton SKUs.

Sustainability and the recycling label

Coles is a signatory to the Australian Packaging Covenant and a member of APCO, and has been rated a leading retailer by APCO since 2019. That commitment flows down to suppliers in three ways.

• The Australasian Recycling Label. Coles expects the ARL on Own Brand packaging and increasingly on national brands. Use the APCO PREP tool to evaluate the pack and generate the correct label artwork.
• Preferred materials and formats. The Own Brand guidelines, written with APCO, steer suppliers away from formats that are hard to recycle in Australia: certain multi-layer films, black plastics that optical sorters cannot see, expanded polystyrene, PVC. If you are Own Brand these are requirements; if you are a national brand they are a strong signal of where Coles is heading.
• Reporting. Larger suppliers report packaging data to APCO. The National Packaging Targets and the eco-modulated fee structure covered in our recyclability note mean the material choice now has a cost attached.

Own Brand: a different process

Coles Own Brand packaging (Coles, Coles Finest, Coles Simply and the rest) is designed to Coles brand guidelines and approved through the Own Brand team. The supplier manufactures; the artwork is controlled by Coles and its appointed agencies. If you are a manufacturer tendering for Own Brand, the packaging brief will come with the design system attached, and your job is production-ready artwork that lives inside it, not a new creative direction. The approval chain is longer than for a national brand and runs through category, technical, legal and the brand team.

The commercial trade-off between private label and your own brand is its own decision. We have written about it separately.

Timelines: range reviews and artwork windows

Coles reviews each category on a cycle, and new products are ranged at those reviews rather than at random. That sets the real deadline for the pack. Work backwards from the range review: the buyer needs to see a near-final pack at the pitch, compliance needs signed-off artwork before the first production run, and the printer needs approved files with enough lead time for proofs and a press run. For a new product that usually means the artwork is locked two to three months before the product is on shelf, and the design work starts two to three months before that.

The rejection checklist

In our experience across categories, the reasons a Coles-bound pack gets sent back are rarely about the design idea. They are almost always one of these.

• Barcode fails verification: truncated height, intruded quiet zone, low contrast, wrong symbology on the carton.
• Allergen statement present but not in the required form, or not bold enough to stand out.
• Net quantity in the wrong position or too small for the pack face size.
• Country of origin mark missing the bar chart, or claiming a higher Australian content than the ingredients support.
• Trade unit over the weight limit, or SRP tray that needs a knife to open.
• Logistics label in the wrong position on the carton.
• Health claims on the front of pack that are not permitted under Standard 1.2.7, or a nutrition content claim without the conditions being met.
• Recycling claims or symbols that do not match the pack's actual recyclability.

Every one of these is checkable before the pack goes to print. The retailer checklist we publish alongside this guide is built from this list.

Written by

Morice Kastoun, Founder & Creative Director

Morice Kastoun is the founder and creative director of Morice&Co., an independent Melbourne branding and packaging studio. His packaging has shipped through the compliance processes of Coles, Woolworths, Chemist Warehouse, Priceline, Petbarn, Big W, Myer and Sephora US.