Coloured honeycomb paper: the colours, what they suit, and what to check before you order

Coloured honeycomb paper is the same die-cut kraft wrap as the brown kind, made from coloured paper. It cushions the same way and grips itself the same way. What changes is what your customer sees when the box opens.

Brown, white and black are in our regular stock. Red, blue, yellow and green are usually in stock too. Any other colour, including your own brand colour, we make to order with a minimum order of 8 pallets of one colour in one width. Choose a colour only if the end customer sees the wrap. Then test it for rub-off and fading before you order in bulk, because colour brings two risks brown kraft does not have.

Natural brown is still the everyday grade, and I think that is right for warehouses and trade parcels. Colour is for brands that sell to consumers. If that is you, these are the questions to settle before the first order.

Which colours are available, and what does each one suit?

Seven standard colours cover most needs, and a brand colour can be made to order. The table is a starting point, not a rule. Your product and your box colour decide the final choice.

If you are still deciding which colour fits your brand, our guide to choosing a wrap colour for your brand goes through that decision step by step. This post is about buying and checking the colour once you know.

Does colour change how well the wrap protects?

It should not, but test it anyway.

Cushioning comes from the paper weight and the cut. We test every lot for GSM, roll weight, moisture and cut quality, and the colour of the paper makes no difference to that routine. A coloured paper at 80 GSM, cut on the same die, should open into the same cells as brown paper at 80 GSM. The colour itself does nothing for protection.

The base paper is different, though. It is a different paper reel, made to a different recipe. So I would treat each colour as a new grade. Wrap your three most fragile products in it, open it on your own dispenser, and drop the parcel. It takes half an hour, and it saves you from learning on live orders.

I would do this even with our paper.

Four checks for colour you can do at your desk

Colour adds risks that brown kraft does not have. The biggest one is colour moving from the paper onto the product. A red wrap that leaves pink marks on a white candle is worse than no colour at all.

You can test this yourself, with things already in your office:

1. Dry rub. Wrap a white cotton cloth around your finger and rub the coloured paper firmly, ten times, in one place. Any colour on the cloth will also reach a pale product during a long journey.
2. Damp rub. Repeat with the cloth slightly damp. Parcels meet rain, cold vans and humid warehouses. If colour moves when damp, keep that colour away from pale or porous products such as candles, soap, linen and unglazed ceramics.
3. Sunlight. Tape one strip of the paper to a sunny window for a week and keep a second strip in a drawer. Compare them. A wrap that fades on a shop shelf or in a showroom display will look old before it is used.
4. Torn edge. Tear a piece and look at the edge. If the inside of the paper is much paler than the surface, the colour sits on top of the fibre rather than right through it. Surface colour is fine for most uses, but it tells you that cut edges and scuffs will show.

For anything that touches food directly, a home test is not enough. Europe has a laboratory standard for exactly this question, EN 646:2018 from CEN, which tests whether dyed paper and board release colour into food simulants such as water, acetic acid and olive oil. If your coloured wrap will touch unwrapped food, ask for that kind of evidence, or keep a plain food-safe layer between the two.

Will the shade be the same on every delivery?

Close, but not always exact. Any dyed paper can shift slightly in shade from one paper batch to the next. Most customers never notice. A brand that puts a red wrap next to a red printed box often does.

We check every lot before it leaves Jaipur, but I cannot promise you an identical shade on paper made months apart. Two habits protect you:

1. Keep a reference piece from the sample you approved, in a drawer, away from light. Compare every new delivery against it in daylight.
2. If the exact shade matters, say so on your purchase order, and agree how close is close enough before the first order, not after a complaint.

I would rather have that conversation with a buyer in advance. A shade question raised after the container lands has no good answer for either of us.

How do you order colours in bulk?

Treat each colour as its own product line. A coloured roll is a separate SKU, with its own stock, its own forecast and its own reorder point.

Availability differs by colour, so plan with it:

This matters most for importers. In a mixed container, we plan at least 4 pallets of each item, and each colour and size is an item. For a 380 mm x 250 m roll, that is 40 rolls a pallet, so 4 pallets is 160 rolls of one colour. A distributor with seven colours in two widths would need a lot of pallets before any brown is loaded.

So I would start small and narrow.

Pick one or two colours that your customers actually ask for, in your best-selling width, and add more only when those two sell steadily. Our export page explains how containers and pallets work, and the products page lists the widths and grades.

On the purchase order, write the colour by name, the GSM, the flat width and the flat length, exactly as you would for brown. Add the reference sample code, if you have one. Our guide to writing a bulk purchase order covers the rest of the order.

Can coloured honeycomb paper be recycled?

Plain coloured paper normally goes into paper recycling with other paper. Two things change the answer: glitter or foil on the paper, and local rules. In the UK, the Recycle Now campaign's page on recycling wrapping paper says paper with foil or glitter cannot be recycled, and that not every council takes wrapping paper.

Our coloured honeycomb is plain paper, with no glitter or foil. Even so, I would be careful with what the colour suggests. A green wrap can make a customer think of an environmental promise you never made. If you want to say anything about recycling on your box, our note on what you can honestly claim explains the wording that holds up.

Where colour is not worth it

We sell coloured paper, so let me be fair about it.

If your parcels go to a warehouse, a trade customer or a marketplace returns desk, nobody is looking at the wrap. Colour then adds cost and one more SKU to manage, and gives nothing back. Brown kraft is the honest choice there.

Colour earns its place when a person opens the box and the wrap is the first thing they see.

Send us the colours you have in mind and two or three of your products. We will tell you which widths and GSM each colour comes in, and we will send samples so you can run the four checks yourself before you decide. You can reach us through the contact page.