London Packaging Week announces raft of new strategic partners
A number of new associations and industry bodies have partnered with London Packaging Week 2026, with the event hoping to promote a more unified and collaborative industry approach
Royal Mail has confirmed that it will now charge business customers for self-adhesive thermal label rolls, which were previously provided free of charge
Royal Mail has confirmed that from today [January 19th], it will begin charging business customers for self-adhesive thermal label rolls. Previously, Royal Mail has provided the label rolls free of charge to those with valid posting accounts.
Under the new changes, standard 100x150mm direct thermal labels will be treated as a paid consumable, listed at £4.69 per roll excluding VAT, which is equivalent to around £5.63 per roll including VAT.
Royal Mail has also reduced the number of thermal label rolls you can order per request for some business accounts, dropping to five rolls per order instead of a previous limit of ten.
Online supplier of packaging materials and consumables, Kite Packaging, has highlighted the change to the cost of thermal label rolls, stating that it is stocking alternatives to the Royal Mail labels which match Royal Mail’s template alignment and printer compatibility.
The product range from Kite Packaging includes compatible 100x150mm direct thermal labels as rolls, A4 sheet labels, and integrated labels. Among its range, Kite offers a number of ‘like-for-like’ alternatives, with own-branded label rolls of 500 or ‘Zebra’ branded rolls of 475 available.
These rolls are reportedly compatible with Zebra and other desktop thermal printers and do not require any additional ink, toner, or ribbon to print.
Alongside its label range, the packaging company also supplies the Zebra ZD421D label printer as a direct, plug-and-play successor to the discontinued Zebra GK420d. This model is designed to accept the same label formats as the ZD421D and core sizes with no reconfiguration, delivering 203dpi print quality at calculated speeds of up to 152mm/s.
A series of news stories from Royal Mail have come out in the last year, as a result of reforms to its Universal Service Obligation (USO) which UK regulator, Ofcom, launched to tackle declining letter volumes and rising costs.
Changes include only delivering non-first class letters every other weekday and keeping its six-day-a-week service for only first-class letters.
By July of 2025, Ofcom had confirmed its decision to support the changes to the USO, with the changes coming into legal effect from July 28th.
By November, Royal Mail had announced that, while a pilot scheme for the new rules had been launched across a selection of delivery offices, the changes would not be implemented nationwide until early 2026.
As of early 2026, Royal Mail has now officially begun the rollout of the changes, including scrapping Saturday second-class letter deliveries.
