Dieline and artwork requirements for charcoal boxes
By Mohamad Sinno, Charcoal Expert ·
Ask AI for an importer brief:
The requirements, in short
A charcoal box has to satisfy two different readers. The press needs a file built on our dieline with bleed, outlined fonts and finishes on their own layers. The destination market needs a warning panel whose wording, languages and letter heights are set by an instrument rather than by taste. Most first proofs fail on the second one, and they fail late, because the panel is usually the last thing anyone thinks about and the only thing with a minimum size written into law.
The annotated dieline: file rules
We supply the dieline files; artwork comes back as vector, Illustrator preferred, CMYK with any Pantone called out. The rules below are the ones that decide whether a file clears prepress on the first pass. Where a rule is an industry convention rather than ours, the table says whose it is and when it was published — a prepress convention with no date and no source is folklore, and the box is where folklore becomes expensive.
| Rule | Why it bites | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Start from our dieline, and do not flatten, scale or resize it | The template encodes the box we actually cut. Rescaling it produces artwork that fits nothing. | PakFactory, supplier guide, 9 August 2023 |
| Confirm the box size and its dieline before any artwork is built | Two inner sizes are two dielines. Designing once and scaling is the most common reason a first proof fails. | Packaging Studio, supplier guide, 14 May 2026 |
| 3 mm bleed on every edge | Cutting tolerance means a colour that stops at the trim line will show white on some boxes and not others. | Packaging Studio, supplier guide, 14 May 2026 |
| Keep live content clear of folds and glue tabs | A logo across a fold reads as a crease, and anything on a glue tab disappears under the seam. | Paperlust, supplier guide, August 2026 — 5 mm clearance |
| Read the template’s colour-coded lines rather than guessing them | Cut, fold, bleed, safe zone and glue tabs are distinct layers; treating a fold line as a cut line is a structural error, not a cosmetic one. | PakFactory, supplier guide, 9 August 2023 |
| CMYK for process, Pantone called out where the brand colour must hold | Our board is duplex over E-flute. A brand colour that matters should be specified, not converted and hoped for. | Our own artwork spec |
| Images at 300 DPI, rules at 0.25 pt or heavier, text at 6 pt or larger | Below those thresholds the press and the board decide what survives, and neither of them consults the file. | PakFactory, supplier guide, 9 August 2023 |
| 100% K for black text and barcodes; fonts converted to outlines | A four-colour black on a barcode is a scanning failure waiting for a busy warehouse. Outlines remove the font question entirely. | PakFactory, supplier guide, 9 August 2023 |
| Finishes on their own named layers, above the artwork, not overlapping | Spot UV and foil are separate passes. If the press cannot separate them from the file, it will ask — and that is another proof round. | Packaging Studio, supplier guide, 14 May 2026 |
The regulatory panel
This is the half that costs proof rounds, and it is the half no supplier's artwork guide covers. Every row below is read from the instrument itself, named in the table, and not from another factory's box. Copying a competitor's panel is not compliance — it is inheriting their reading of a rule, including any mistake in it.
| Market | Instrument | What it requires |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 16 CFR 1500.14(b)(6)(ii) | A borderlined carbon-monoxide warning label, with the pictogram, on containers packaged on or after 3 November 1997. Signal word “WARNING” in bold capitals at 7.14 mm or larger; the remaining text at 4.763 mm or larger; “CARBON MONOXIDE HAZARD” in bold, that phrase and “NEVER” in capitals; stroke-width-to-height 1:6 to 1:8; the label at least 50.8 mm high and 147.5 mm wide, in a colour sharply contrasting with the background. |
| Canada | Charcoal Regulations, SOR/2016-178, sections 2 and 3 | A warning in English and in French on each principal display surface, enclosed by a borderline. “Warning” and “Avertissement” in letters at least 9 mm high; the ventilation statement at least 4.5 mm; bold-face or medium-face type; the warning and its borderline in a colour contrasting sharply with the background, set apart from other information and images. |
| European Union | No instrument establishes one for this product | Not established here — do not assume a panel and do not assume its absence. EN 1860-2 is a standard for barbecue charcoal composition and emissions, not a retail-labelling rule for shisha charcoal. We have not read an EU instrument that sets a panel for this product, so this page states nothing about one. |
The US label's wording is fixed by the regulation and reproduced there as an image rather than as text, which is worth knowing if you go looking for it: it reads “WARNING — CARBON MONOXIDE HAZARD. Burning charcoal inside can kill you. It gives off carbon monoxide, which has no odor. NEVER burn charcoal inside homes, vehicles or tents.” alongside a crossed-circle pictogram showing a grill, a tent and a house.
One distinction the regulation makes and most summaries lose: the label itself is required on containers, while the placement rules and letter heights that follow it are written for bags — position in the upper quarter of the front and back panels, clear of the seam, with a further relaxation for bags six inches or less wide. A retail box carries the label; the geometry around it is the closest published standard rather than a rule drafted for that pack format. We build to it because it is the measurable one, and a US-bound buyer should confirm the reading with their own adviser rather than with us.
The Canadian and American panels are not the same panel with a translation added. Canada wants both languages on each principal display surface, sets its own letter heights of 9 mm and 4.5 mm, and asks for a ventilation statement rather than the American carbon-monoxide wording. A single artwork that satisfies both is possible; one that satisfies both by accident is not, and the space it needs has to be designed in at the start rather than found at the end.
The prepress rejections we see most
The most useful thing we can tell you here is not a rule, it is a proportion. On the one launch we publish in full, the artwork cycle ran like this: More than three proof rounds, driven by text, languages and the warning panel — not by colour and not by box structure. That is the shape of nearly every artwork cycle we run.
Designers arrive expecting the argument to be about colour, because colour is what a design review is normally about. It almost never is. The rounds go on which languages appear, whose wording the panel uses, and whether the warning still meets its minimum letter height after the layout moved. Every one of those is answerable before the first proof — from the instrument for the market you are shipping to, not from the last box you saw on a shelf.
So the practical order is: fix the format, take the dieline for that exact box, lay out the panel for the destination first, and design around it. Reversing those last two is what turns one proof round into four. Once the artwork is approved, print QA is a separate gate with a separate failure mode, and what the proof cycle does to the calendar is on the lead-time page.
Ask for the dieline pack
Send the shape, the size and the inner format, and the export desk returns the dieline for that box. Tell us the destination market in the same message and we will flag the panel before your designer starts rather than after the first proof.