Printed kraft takeout bags for San Francisco restaurants.

A city that eats out of a bag

San Francisco packs a lot of food into seven by seven miles. Burritos from the Mission, dim sum from Chinatown, pho and Burmese from the Richmond, bakery boxes from the Sunset, lunch counters downtown and in SoMa. A huge share of it never sits on a plate in the dining room. It leaves in a bag, rides a bike courier up a hill, and gets opened on a desk or a kitchen counter somewhere else.

That trip is where most kitchens lose their name. The food is great, the bag is blank, and the customer remembers the app instead of you. A printed bag fixes that for about 56.7¢ a bag on Subscribe & Save.

Two city rules, one open question

San Francisco moved early. Foam to-go containers have been off the table since 2007, and your containers need to be recyclable or compostable in the City's programs. Since 2019 the extras, like napkins, chopsticks, utensils and sauce packets, only go in when a customer asks or grabs them from a self-serve spot.

Neither rule tells you what to carry the order in. That part is open. So when the order is leaner and the containers are plain fiber or paper, the outside of the bag is the one surface left where your brand can speak.

If you're looking across the whole region, start with our guide to logo printed takeout bags in the Bay Area.

Delivery apps count too. San Francisco's extras rule covers how orders get packed no matter who carries them, so set your app menus to ask before adding forks or napkins. Then look at what the customer actually sees when the rider hands it over: a sealed bag. If that bag is blank, the app gets the credit. If it shows your logo, you do.

What to put on a San Francisco bag

Keep it big and simple. Your logo, your name and one short line, like a neighborhood or a cross street. The print area is 12 × 14 in on the front of the bag, which is plenty for a logo someone can read from across a BART car.

Pick the paper to match your containers. Brown kraft looks right next to molded fiber bowls. Bright white kraft makes a colorful logo jump. Both are 110 GSM paper and hold up to 22 lb, so a family dinner with soup and rice gets home in one trip.

Small shops, long memories

San Francisco keeps an official Legacy Business Registry for shops that have been part of a neighborhood for decades. You don't need 30 years to act like a place people will remember. A bag with your name on it is the cheapest way to show up on every block your food travels to.

Running a spot in a specific part of town? We wrote pages for the Mission District and Chinatown too.