Printed kraft takeout bags for Oakland kitchens.

A city that eats on the move

Oakland food is street food first. Taco trucks line International Boulevard through Fruitvale. Telegraph Avenue in Temescal packs coffee, brunch and Korean spots into a few blocks. Chinatown near Webster Street sells roast meats and dumplings by the box. Lake Merritt fills with people eating out of paper on a sunny Sunday.

That means a lot of Oakland food never sits on a plate in your dining room. It rides home on BART, sits on a car seat up the hill, or gets eaten on a bench by the lake. Whatever it travels in is what people see.

Compostable containers, and then a plain bag?

Oakland banned foam food ware back in 2007 and asked that takeout packaging be compostable. So your boxes and bowls are already paper or fiber. With more than 443,000 people living on about 56 square miles, that adds up to a lot of fiber boxes leaving Oakland counters every night.

That makes the kraft paper bag the obvious carrier. The odd part is how many Oakland kitchens hand that bag over blank. You paid for it, the customer carries it through the neighborhood, and it says nothing about you.

What to put on an Oakland bag

Keep it to three things: your name, your mark and one way to find you again. A street name works great here. People in this town know Temescal from Fruitvale from Jack London Square, and a bag that says where you cook earns a nod.

Our print area covers 12 × 14 in on the front, so a big logo still has room around it. Bold, one or two colors, no tiny text. If you want to see how other designs land on kraft first, look at the print proof page.

Trucks, pop-ups and the Friday rush

If you sell from a truck or a stall at a night market, you don't have a sign on a building. The bag is the sign. Someone walks away from your window and twenty people see your name before they reach their car.

The bag holds up to 22 lb and measures 12″ × 7″ × 14″, so a family order of trays, tortillas and drinks fits in one. Start with the printed kraft bags for Bay Area restaurants overview if you want the whole picture, or go straight to the prices below.