New Feature: QR Codes for Food Labels That Link to Your Recipes

Someone picks up a jar of your chili crisp at a farmers market, turns it over, and wonders what to do with it besides fried eggs. The label has room for ingredients, a barcode and maybe one serving idea. Your blog has a few dozen recipes that answer the question, and nothing on the jar points to them. QR codes for food labels close that gap.

Recipe Kit makes QR codes for your recipes. Print one on a label, a jar, a shelf card or the recipe card you hand out at the register, and a shopper who scans it with their phone camera lands on your recipe. There are two kinds. A blog code sends people to your whole recipe blog, and a recipe code sends them to one recipe.

One code for every label you print

The blog code is the one I would start with. It points at your recipe blog, not at a single post, so the same code goes on every product you sell. The hot sauce and the spice rub get the same artwork file. Every recipe you publish after the labels are printed shows up behind the code, and the packaging never changes.

Recipe codes are for pairings that sell each other. A sauce and the dish it goes in. A spice blend with a recipe card tucked in the box. Open the recipe in Recipe Kit, select QR code at the top, and you get a code that goes straight to that recipe's blog post.

QR codes for food labels that keep working

This is the part that matters once ink is on a label. The code does not contain your blog post's address. It points at a Recipe Kit link, and Recipe Kit looks up the current address every time someone scans.

Rename a post or change its URL, and the code follows. Switch your default recipe blog, and the blog code follows that too. Codes you have already printed keep working even if you change plans later. A thousand labels in the stockroom do not turn into a reprint because you tidied up your blog.

Make it look like part of your packaging

The caption under the code starts as the recipe title, or "Our recipes" for the blog code. Change it to anything up to 80 characters. "Scan for 5 ways to cook this" gives people a reason to pull out their phone, and a bare code gives them none. You can also print the code in your brand color. Keep it dark, though. Phones struggle to read a pale code, and the background is always white.

When it looks right, download it as a PNG for Canva or a Word label template, or as an SVG your printer can scale to any size without going blurry. For market stalls and small batches there is a print sheet with 12 codes on US Letter paper and dashed cut lines. Run it through the printer on sticker paper and you have labels the same afternoon.

See how many people scan

Every code shows its total scans and its scans in the last 30 days, and Recipe Kit counts the blog code and each recipe code separately. Put a recipe code on the box of a new spice blend and within a month you will know whether anyone is using it.

Scans also arrive with tracking tags (utm_source=recipekit_qr), so Shopify Analytics and Google Analytics list QR visits as their own traffic source.

Ideas to try

• Every product label. Put the blog code on all of your packaging. You design it once and never reprint for new recipes.
• A recipe card in the box. Use the recipe code for the dish your product was made for. The card stays small and the full method lives on your blog.
• Your market stall. A shelf card with "Scan for recipes" under the code answers "what do I do with this?" while you are busy at the till.
• Stockists' shelves. If a grocery store carries your product, a card next to it gives their shoppers a way onto your site.

Before a big print run, print one copy at the size you plan to use and scan it with your phone. Keep the code at least 2 cm (0.8 in) across and leave the white border around it alone.

Getting it

QR codes are part of the Growth plan. The blog code lives under Tools > QR codes in Recipe Kit, and every recipe has a QR code button at the top of its page. A recipe code needs the recipe connected to a blog post first. Until it is, the code sends people to your homepage, and Recipe Kit warns you about it. The QR codes help article walks through setup.

Your label already goes home with every customer. Now it can send them to your recipes. Get Recipe Kit on the Shopify App Store and print your first code.

Patrick & the Recipe Kit team