Bought by one, opened for another.

Pet food is bought emotionally and inspected carefully. The person paying is reading the composition panel and the feeding guide, and at the same time deciding whether the brand looks like something they want in the kitchen. Those two jobs pull in opposite directions on a pack that is often small, and the copy panel keeps growing.

Weight and handling do the rest of the damage. A multipack of wet food is heavier than almost anything else in the trolley, and the pack that holds it gets stacked, dropped, and dragged off a shelf by the corner. Board grade and grain direction decide whether that still looks acceptable at the checkout, and those are drawing decisions rather than printing ones.

Then there is what is inside. Wet food, oily treats and supplements all attack board differently, and the barrier that solves one can be the wrong answer for another. We would rather specify against the actual product than against pet food as a category, because a fish-based tray and a dry biscuit carton are not the same problem.

The last part is range. A brand now runs from a small treat carton to a large multipack, sold in a shop, in a subscription box and on a marketplace listing, and the customer expects all of it to look like one thing. Holding a colour across those formats, on different boards and different print dates, is the part worth measuring rather than judging.