If you run a burger shop in the US—whether it's a smash burger window in LA or a food truck in Austin—you've probably already noticed one thing: the first second a customer gets their burger, they don't bite into it. They take a photo. And in that photo, your burger only takes up half the frame—the other half is the paper wrapped around it.

The paper is wrinkled, greasy, and creased by fingers, but the logo on it is crystal clear. The customer posts it to their Instagram Story, a friend swipes past and sees your shop's name. You didn't spend a cent on paid promotion for this ad—the cost was already amortized into that sheet of paper.

That's what I want to talk about today: how to choose custom greaseproof paper, how to use it, and how to make your burger shop look the most "brand-like" for the least amount of money.

ONE

First, figure out what level of oil resistance your burger actually needs

Not all oil-resistant paper can handle the oil load of a double smash burger.

A typical American burger joint scenario: two smashed patties, American cheese melted into one sheet, sauce (Thousand Island, mayo-based burger sauce, or hot sauce) oozing out from the edges of the bun. The paper needs to hold up for the 5 to 10 minutes it takes the customer to walk back to their seat or drive home — without tearing, leaking, or getting grease on the customer's hands.

In the industry, there's a metric called the Kit value (oil resistance rating, 1–12). Regular baking paper might be fine at Kit 3–5, but burger places need at least Kit 7 or above. For fried items or things with especially heavy sauce (like a Nashville hot chicken sandwich), go straight to Kit 9–12 specs. You don't need to understand the chemistry of the coating — you just need to ask the supplier one question: "What Kit value does this paper pass?" If they can't answer, move on to the next one.

Another thing burger joints tend to overlook is breathability. Fully sealed oil-resistant paper traps steam inside, and the bun goes from "crisp and soft" to "soggy and limp" within five minutes. Good oil-resistant paper resists oil but is slightly breathable — or at the very least, don't wrap it too tight and leave a little room to breathe. I'll go into more detail on this in the tutorial section later.

TWO

Monochrome or two-color? Printing strategy for a burger shop

What you're offering is single- or two-color food-grade printing. For an independent burger shop, this option is actually smarter than full color.

Why? Because the burger itself is the visual focus. The charred brown of the patty, the melted yellow of the cheese, the green of the lettuce, the red of the tomato—these colors are already saturated enough. Packaging with a white or kraft paper base + a single-color logo actually makes the food pop. Fully printed full-color paper looks lively, but when people take photos, the food and the background compete for attention, and the customer's eye wanders.

Single-/two-color printing has a very practical use in the U.S. independent restaurant scene: using color to distinguish product lines. For example:

Classic beef burgers use black single-color printing for the logo—minimal, with attitude, in line with the aesthetic of today's smash burger shops (think of the clean feel of Shake Shack in its early days).

Spicy chicken burgers use red single-color printing for the logo—before customers even take a bite, visually they've already been given a "spicy" cue.

Veggie burgers or breakfast sandwiches use green or brown to distinguish them from the meat packaging.

Two-color is suited to slightly more complex brand identities—for example, one color prints the main logo body, and the other color prints a slogan or a tagline beneath the shop name. Pantone spot-color matching is key here: single-/two-color printing usually uses PMS inks, which can accurately reproduce your brand color and avoid things like "the logo prints out orange-ish." Have the supplier provide a proof before ordering, and hold the physical sample up against your menu and signage to compare.

On size selection, the two most commonly used specs for burger shops: 14×14 inches is suitable for breakfast sandwiches and small burgers (regular cheeseburger, egg sandwich), and 18×18 inches is suitable for full-size burgers and double patties. If you have both on the menu, stock both sizes—don't force one size to wrap everything. A small one wrapping a big item will leak, and a big one wrapping a small item wastes paper and won't wrap tightly.

THREE

Tutorial: How to Wrap a "Photo-Ready" Burger

This part is hands-on. Many staff wrap burgers by putting the burger in the center, pulling the four corners together, and scrunching it into a ball. It holds the burger, but it's ugly. It's also a pain for customers to unwrap.

Here's a wrapping method that holds up to photos on social media, suitable for 18×18 paper:

Step 1: Lay the paper flat and place the burger right in the center, but slightly below center. Leave about two inches more paper at the top than at the bottom. That extra portion at the top will eventually form the clean folded surface on the front.

Step 2: Fold the bottom edge up to cover the lower half of the burger, then fold back a small lip. This small lip (about half an inch) is the key to making the paper hug the curve of the burger's bottom. Don't fold it all the way in one go—fold once first, use your fingers to press the paper into the gap between the burger's bottom and the patty, then fold a second time.

Step 3: Bring the left and right sides in toward the center. Don't fold them in half—fold like you're folding an envelope: fold the left side in, then overlap the right side on top, with an overlap of about two to three inches. Put the overlap at the bottom of the burger, not on the front. Keep the front as one clean, unbroken printed surface.

Step 4: Fold the top edge down and tuck it into the pocket formed by the left and right folds. This step replaces tape. The folded-down top edge slides under the previously folded layers of paper, and the paper locks itself in place. No tape, no stickers needed the whole way through.

A burger wrapped this way has a complete, logo-printed paper surface on the front—flat, with no extra wrinkles—so when customers take photos, the logo is upright. To unwrap, just pull from the bottom and it opens right up—no tearing needed.

One small detail: if your paper is single-color printed, make sure the logo sits slightly above center when wrapping. When the burger is on the table, the customer's gaze naturally falls on the upper half, so that's where the logo gets the most exposure.

Four

A true story about a burger shop owner in Chicago

I know a guy who runs a burger shop in Logan Square, Chicago, named Danny. His shop has only twelve seats, and the menu has just three things: single, double, fries. Before 2023, he used blank greaseproof paper bought from Restaurant Depot, a few hundred sheets to a box, cheap, use it and toss it.

The change happened on a Saturday night. A customer took a photo of the burger in the shop and posted it to Instagram. Danny's burger photographed really well — the charred crust on the patty, the melted cheese, the sesame seeds on the bun, the lighting was beautiful too. But that customer @-mentioned a burger shop a block over in the Story, because there was no branding at all on that blank paper, and the customer remembered the wrong shop name.

Danny said he stared at that Story for a long time that night. His burger had been posted by a food account with twenty thousand followers, and the traffic went to someone else.

The next week he found a supplier and ordered a run of kraft-colored greaseproof paper with single-color black printing, 18×18, logo dead center, with a line of small text underneath showing the address and Instagram handle. No fancy design, just clean black type printed on the paper. The minimum order wasn't high, a few thousand sheets, and the unit price worked out to less than three cents more than the blank paper.

Three months later he showed me his backend data: Instagram mentions were up nearly fourfold. Not because he ran ads, but because every customer who ate in or took out, as long as they photographed the burger, his shop name was right there in the frame. Someone took the paper home, shot a photo of it spread out, and captioned it "even the paper is good." That post brought him the most new customers walking in that month.

Danny's exact words I still remember to this day: "I used to think packaging was a cost. Then I realized packaging is the one thing customers will voluntarily hold up to the camera."

In Closing

Competition among burger joints comes down to the meat, the bun, and the sauce—all true. But when customers walk out the door, there are only two things they take with them: the memory of the taste, and that piece of paper wrapped around the burger. Taste fades. The logo on the paper stays—as long as it doesn't get thrown away.

That three-cent-per-wrapper price difference buys you every photo, every post, and every time someone opens their lunch at the office and the coworker next to them asks, "Where'd you get that?" However you do the math, it's a deal you can't lose on.