This is the response from the manufacturer when I asked them about the possibility of adhesive being light. and th second question if he has ever seen stock come in with light adhesive.
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We have not changed anything about the paster labels; we are still using the same material and adhesive we always have used in the past. The adhesive is actually applied by the paper mill, not something that we apply in house, so there should not be any chance of the adhesive running out during production.
If I may ask, are the trouble pasters being applied to recycled cardboard? We had some issues in the past with some recycled boxes we'd purchased - we couldn't even get carton tape to stick to them, let alone labels. Could this be a possibility?
Please let us know your thoughts. We take any issues you may have very seriously and want to help all we can to solve them."
"Almost never. The paper companies do have a range of tolerance in their spec, but it's generally pretty tight. If there are specific orders these happened on we could try to get the company to analyze them, but I've almost never seen any material that was far out of spec without it being noticed in the production process."