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Possibly convenience.
If you have a large font that fills the available area then you need to align the print very well and you will get occasional mismatches - these will be a reject - product and all - and cost money.
It is easier to use a small font and aim for the centre, then a little misalignment does not create a reject.
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Quote: They don't actually want you to read the labels
Hiding all the "stuffed ingredients" in small print like 2g chlorine, 0.1g sianide... In bolder readable letters - "The safest product ever!, consume it now"! 
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Obligatory XKCD
cheers
Chris Maunder
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It's No. 5. Definitely. 
Seriously, I think that Sander's explanation is probably close to the mark.
Certain countries mandate a minimal point size for ingredients, the "small print" on contracts, etc. In some of them, a contract that is printed in too-small font can even be invalidated on that basis!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Which countries are they?
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In Israel, there is a minimum size allowed for "small print". I'm sure it's not the only country on the globe with this requirement.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I have made a habit of scanning all Instructions for Use, User Guide or whatever, at 600 dpi suitable for scaling, as soon as the product enters my house. I haven't started doing it for food labels yet, but the day I see a need for it, I've got the routine.
It won't work that well if the label is wrapped half way around a cylindrical bottle or can, but if it goes half way around, the print can't be that small. Maybe my SLR would work better for bottles/cans; the flatbed scanner wants the image to lay flat on the glass. Transferring photos from the camera to the PC is also a well drilled routine. I've got a macro lens for my camera, so focusing on 2pt print is not a problem (I guess it would be with most smartphone cameras).
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It's point number one. They don't want you to know what's in the product. It's not just for bread and soy sauce.
There's also a lot of tricks they play. Like for instance, the FDA allows the package to say "zero trans fat" if there's less than 0.5 grams per serving. With a small serving size that can still add up despite the package saying zero when it's clearly not. It's not by accident.
How it's made and if it could kill you or not isn't "cool". What's cool is logos and if it was shown on TV with chicks or something.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: They don't want you to know what's in the product.
That is an essential point. They use all sorts of strange names, both to make it sound fancy, like declaring the contents of 'aqua' or chemical names filling two lines, and when you look it up, it really is a super-fancy(?) way of identifying some everyday substance.
Or they use chemical names in inventive ways to hide ingredients that the customer might find undesirable, such as not saying 'salt', but specifying chloride and natrium content separately. Except that in Norwegian, 'natrium' is name of sodium, so here, they write it as chloride and sodium, hoping that we will not realize that they are talking about NaCl, salt.
And then there are the ads declaring, say, "Pepsodent toothpaste with irium". When they were pressed about this 'irium', they had to admit that it was their name for water. They had always been careful to never claim to be the only ones with irium, and they had never claimed it to have particular positive effects (that could not be ascribed to water). Yet lots of customers chose the toothpaste that contained irium.
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On a related subject - I also hate it when they print black letters on a dark colored (blue / red / green) background. The font size might actually be big enough to read if they had just printed in white or chose a lighter background.
Contrast people! Contrast!!
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I'm not kind: brain dead designers. Lack of empathy.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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Doesn't it have to be in French and English as well?
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That's nothing; in the EU it has to be in all the Official Languages, which leads to "quick start" booklets as thick as novels. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Probably all of the above.
It's like TV advertising in the UK where by law the small print (T&C's) have to be included, so they are gabbled in a voice over as quickly as possible, so they are as hard as possible to comprehend. Just shows how deceitful the advertising industry and their customers are.
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They also have an annoying tendency to use colour combinations like black print on a dark red ground. And they seem to make the font inversely proportional to the age of the target reader.
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I would guess number one. Many medical TV ads, after saying how great their product is, often have a disclaimer (how it may in fact harm you) in small low contrast fonts which are on screen for only a few seconds.
I am 80 years old, still writing apps (well sort of), and small font size is always an issue for me.
Bring back punched cards!!
73
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Chris, they're age-ist, twentysomething arsehats who will get their comeuppance when they hit their 40's. In my experience (I'm 62), that's your only hope.
Nobody gives a crap about accessibility issues for anyone over the age of 25.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Oddly, another place this is true is the Android Alarm Clock interface.
Huge canvas with tiny, widely spaced print. For no reason I can think of.
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So, I liked #3 as a great rationalization, and I know Sander’s answer is closest to the truth, but I would have bet that the store manager assigned the task to whomever was working in the bakery - without regard to whether they had any experience at all with computers, labels, fonts, or printing.
That person, after finally getting something to print on the actual label, said “Good enough!”
Time is the differentiation of eternity devised by man to measure the passage of human events.
- Manly P. Hall
Mark
Just another cog in the wheel
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I wrote label printing software in the late 90s/early 2000s for hardware-type stores, streaming data from the computer's COM port to an RS232 port on the printer. The few label printers we developed for (I remember SATO printers) had "built in" support for specific font types and sizes. If you used any font/size combination not built in then the printer treated it as a graphic rather than text. This slowed the printing down considerably - from 20 or 30 labels per second to 1 label per second. The font sizes supported were strange - if you went up one size it effectively doubled the printed size. To figure out the finished label, you get the max size that would ever be printed per field and play a long game of massaging the various fields' fonts/sizes to get things looking ok. Another problem is the DIP switches on the printer. If not set right it can affect the printing. I'm not saying the food packaging label designers put a lot of thought in, but there might be legitimate reasons. Someone mentioned Bartender software - I used that as well during the discovery phase, but we ditched it for the printing speed of using the built-in fonts.
Mike
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My very first job was writing a printer driver for geo plots on a state-of-the-art printer that used actual pens for printing (as in, it would pick a pen from the rack of pens, draw in that colour, put the pen back. It was mesmerising). I remember spending a lot of time working on getting the font sizes right.
I guess this is what's doing my head in: working out how to measure the width of a piece of text you are about to print is a task that needs to be done once per system. Providing the means to change fonts seems to be definitely already built in (I see different font weights and size in this micro-text). For some reason putting the two together just seems...to hard?
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Not quite the explanation here, but what I know ...
We have auto bagging machines here at the building I work in. The bags are printed with all the art work in a generic format, and come on a roll of 5000. When we designed the bag artwork, we left ourselves a 2" by 4" space to print the product name, specs, UPC Barcode, customer logo, etc. As time passed, we had to print more legal stuff in the print area, and the printing got smaller for some text, and increased the size of the barcode, so it scans on every barcode scanner you can imagine.
So these auto baggers, feed a bag into the plenum, blow air into the bag to open it, and dump product into it by weight, and seal the bag, then tear and dump into a bin.
We can't make the print area larger, because were limited by the heat thermal transfer head size that prints the information. We can't buy a larger one, because the ones we have match the entire system, where we use RS232 to download the data to the thermal heat thermal transfer print head.
To print larger, we would have to buy all brand new equipment, which is not cost effective.
I know with major bread brands, they can afford to have a custom bag printed for each bread type, because they only offer White and Wheat. They just auto bag, and print the factory number, batch number, UPC Barcode, and expiration date in a specified area.
I first saw tiny print 30 years ago coming from Asia, with products such as Sony, Toshiba, etc, because they tried to print in 5 different languages on the same sheet of paper designed for a single market place. But now they can consolidate that one product, and ship it to many market places, such as the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe.
Hope that helps ...
If it ain't broke don't fix it
Discover my world at jkirkerx.com
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Do you mind if I ask Why does Firefox not like your link "View My Work"
I am not being critical just trying to understand what Firefox is doing
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Don't know yet. I just renewed my SSL certificate, and maybe I got it wrong. I tested it from home, and I didn't get any warnings, so I'm not sure yet. On Firefox IOS, says connection secure. Kind of stupid that I buy a 5 year certificate, and I have to regenerate it every year for 5 years, on like June 11. I went to generate it this year, and forgot how to do it, and messed up, and had to do it again, so maybe that's it.
If it ain't broke don't fix it
Discover my world at jkirkerx.com
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