Labelling at the factory or relabelling at the warehouse: what each option costs you
Almost every importer discovers the cost of labelling after the goods have arrived. It is an avoidable cost, and you avoid it at the quoting stage, not at unloading.
What the standard requires
NOM-050-SCFI-2004 requires imported products sold in Mexico to display commercial information prominently in Spanish: generic product name or denomination, net quantity or content, importer details with address, country of origin, and—where applicable—warnings and instructions for use.
Other countries across Latin America enforce equivalent requirements under other names. The underlying principle is identical: consumers must be able to read what they are buying in their native language, and the responsibility lies with the importer, not the manufacturer.
The two ways to handle it
The first approach is relabelling at destination: the goods arrive with English-only labels or no labels at all, and warehouse staff manually stick adhesive labels on piece by piece. This is the default option, and it is the more expensive of the two, even if it does not look that way.
The second approach is printing the compliant label directly at the factory. The bag, colour box or sticker leaves the factory already printed in Spanish with your company legal name and fiscal address, and the goods are unloaded ready to sell.
Why relabelling costs more than you think
The visible cost is labour: someone sticking labels on 20,000 pieces. The invisible cost is lost time—inventory sitting idle in a warehouse rather than generating revenue—plus label materials, and the percentage of crooked, misaligned, or peeling stickers that end up as unsellable scrap.
There is also a risk that is not measured in money until it happens: if goods arrive without mandatory commercial information and your retail account audits the delivery at receiving, they can reject the whole delivery. With factory-printed labels applied at origin, that rejection scenario simply does not exist.
How we manage it at the factory
We print the compliant Spanish label directly at our plant. You provide your legal entity name, fiscal address, tax ID (RFC) if you want it printed, and the generic product denomination approved by your consultant, and we put it on the OPP bag, the colour box or a sticker applied on the line, depending on your packaging.
The added unit cost at the factory is marginal compared to the expense of warehouse relabelling. The critical requirement is specifying it during quotation: changing the packaging artwork after samples are approved costs time, and a programme with a new mould already takes 50 working days end to end.
What to define before sending the artwork
The exact generic product denomination (which must be determined by your regulatory consultant or customs broker, not by us), the net content unit exactly as you intend to declare it, and whether the fiscal address should appear in full or abbreviated form. These are only three details, but getting any of them wrong means reprinting all the packaging.
If the same product is going to more than one country in the region, let us know from the beginning: it can often be solved with common artwork plus a sticker for each country, instead of different packaging for each market.