Branded plastic cups are reusable polypropylene cups printed with a logo or design, used by UK venues, festivals and businesses in place of glass or disposables. Minimum order is typically 50 cups, prices start from around £0.33 per cup at volume, and standard UK manufacturing lead time is 10 working days from artwork sign-off.
We mould and print them ourselves in Stockton-on-Tees. The guidance below is what we tell buyers on the phone, in the order the decisions actually get made.
Decision one: which print method?
There are two, and the choice is not really about appearance. It is about how long the branding needs to survive.
Single colour screen print. A rotary screen lays ink onto the moulded cup. Fast, clean, and the cost-effective route for a wordmark, crest or single-colour logo. Ideal where the cup is doing a season rather than a decade, and where the design is simple. Our pint to line in single colour starts from £0.35 per cup.
Full colour in-mould labelling (IML). The printed label is placed into the mould and the polypropylene is injected around it, fusing artwork and cup into one piece. Three consequences follow. Photographic images, gradients and complex multi-colour designs are all possible. There is no per-colour upcharge, so a twelve-colour design costs the same as a two-colour one. And the print physically cannot peel, scratch or fade, because it is not on the surface, it is in the wall. Our pint to line in full colour starts from £0.55 per cup.
The rule of thumb: if the cup is going through a commercial glasswasher more than a handful of times, specify IML. Surface print on a cup washed 200 times will show it. IML will not.
Decision two: which cup format?
| Format | Typical use | From (full colour, 2,000 units) |
|---|---|---|
| Pint to line | Draught beer and cider, legal measure service | £0.55 |
| Pint to brim | Soft drinks, cocktails, mixers, maximum volume | £0.55 |
| Half pint | Halves, tasting sessions, wine and prosecco service | £0.43 |
| Two pint | Concourse and busy bar service, halves the trips to the bar | £0.80 |
| Stackable | Space-constrained bars, fast collection and wash cycles | On request |
| Wine and spirits | Hospitality, weddings, corporate | On request |
Two format notes that catch buyers out.
To line versus to brim. A pint to line cup holds 568ml at a printed fill line with headroom above it for a head on the beer. A pint to brim cup holds 568ml at the rim. If you are serving draught beer or cider to a stated measure on licensed premises, you need a UKCA marked line measure. If the cup is only used for cocktails, spirits measured separately, or soft drinks, the line mark is optional and to-brim gives you the full volume in the cup. Our guide to what a festival pint is covers the measure markings in full.
Mixing sizes. You can combine formats in one order. The 50 cup minimum applies per variant, not across the whole order, so a venue can take 500 pints and 200 halves in a single run.
Decision three: how many?
Quantity drives price harder than anything else, because setup cost is fixed regardless of run length. A 50 cup run and a 5,000 cup run incur similar setup; the difference is spread across very different volumes.
Pricing on our Eco Saver tier starts from £0.33 per cup at 5,000 units. Small runs cost more per unit. That is not a penalty, it is arithmetic.
For working out how many you actually need, take your busiest single service period, double it, and make sure that number covers a full session without a mid-service shortage. If you are running a deposit scheme, factor a return rate between 70% and 90% into your stock, because cups leaving the site are cups not available for the next session. Our bulk ordering guide covers the sizing maths in full.
Are branded plastic cups legal for serving alcohol?
Yes, when the cup carries a UKCA line measure. Every pint, half-pint and two-pint cup we make is UKCA marked at the legal fill line during production, which is what licensed premises in Great Britain need to serve draught beer and cider to a stated measure.
The mark is applied at manufacture, not added afterward, which matters: a cup cannot be retrospectively made compliant. If a supplier offers to print onto unmarked stock, the resulting cup is not a legal measure. More detail on the marking itself is on our UKCA certified cups page.
Reusable or disposable?
The phrase “branded disposable plastic cups” gets searched a lot, and for most commercial buyers it is the wrong product.
A disposable is printed on the surface, used once, and disposed of. You pay for the cup on every drink served, and you pay again to have the waste removed. A reusable polypropylene cup costs more per unit, survives 200 or more commercial wash cycles, and replaces between 100 and 250 disposables across its life.
Run it as cost per serve rather than cost per cup and the reusable wins at almost any meaningful volume. It also keeps working after the event, because a branded cup that goes home in a bag carries your logo around a kitchen cupboard for the next year. That is the part disposables cannot do at any price. Our comparison of reusable plastic cups goes deeper on durability and spec.
Artwork: what to send and what gets rejected
Send vector artwork, AI, EPS or PDF, with fonts outlined and colours specified as Pantone references where colour accuracy matters. A low-resolution JPEG lifted from a website is the single most common cause of delay.
For IML, note that the print area wraps the cup body but does not extend to the base or the very rim, so keep critical elements away from the edges. We check every file against the print area before quoting and produce a free 3D digital proof showing exactly how the artwork sits on the cup. Nothing goes to production until you sign that off, and the printed cup matches the proof.
Full detail on file prep is in our guide to branding cups for events.
Lead times
Standard branded production is 10 working days from artwork sign-off. The Eco Saver tier runs 25 working days at our lowest unit price, which is what most festivals and seasonal buyers order on. Plain UKCA-marked stock without branding dispatches in 5 working days.
The delay we see most often is not manufacturing. It is internal artwork approval. Get your logo signed off before you place the order and the lead time behaves.
Browse the branded cups range, the custom plastic cups page, or personalised festival cups.