Learn how to make edible wedding favors that cost ~$1 each. These minimalist homemade favors offer your guests a personal gift of appreciation while remaining low maintenance so you can stay sane during wedding preparation.
If you visit the Grover Cleveland Birthplace museum in New Jersey, you’ll find a 130-year old slice of nut-laden fruitcake in its collection.
This slice was cut from the 25-pound fruitcake at President Grover Cleveland’s and his bride Frances Folsom’s wedding in 1886. Guests received “satin boxes containing pieces of the bridal cake” to take home. Each slice bore the hand-painted monogram “C.–F.”
Since we don’t all have the resources available to a sitting U.S. president, how can we use a bit of creativity and elbow grease to provide a similarly charming wedding favor for our guests?
In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through the wedding favors I designed and made for our upcoming wedding reception. It comes with step-by-step guidance and free printables to help you make memorable and personal favors that will delight your friends and family.
Why did I make edible wedding favors?
Eco-friendly
Most people throw out wedding favors. When was the last time you kept a shot glass, bottle opener, or dinner plate with the couple’s names printed on them?
To avoid more waste in the landfill, I opted for consumable gifts.
SIDE NOTE: The most eco-friendly option is to skip wedding favors. And there are no rules that you must gift favors.
Personality
If I’m gifting wedding favors, it’s important to infuse my personality into them. I’d rather skip favors than to gift banal Hershey kisses (unless they’re personalized).
What makes these wedding favors different?
With my 2 criteria above, my biggest problem was balancing a personal gift that is cheap cost-effective and very quick to make. I don’t want to wrap and curl ribbon around 70 bags. I didn’t want to purchase new equipment — such as specialty hole punches, dozens of mason jars, or God-forbid a Cricut machine — for this one-time project. And since we’re flying back to California, I didn’t want to lug around 70 mason jars in my luggage.
Since I didn’t find any tutorials online to meet my requirements, I’m offering you my tutorial designed to be quick, easy, and minimalist.
What kinds of DIY wedding favors can you make?
This tutorial focuses on 3 kinds of consumable wedding favors:
- Commit-Mint Tea
- Flower Power Tea
- Meant-To-Bean Coffee
I recommend you choose 1 of the 3 to streamline the process. Each type of gift is the same effort, so you can mix and match if you want variety.
Step 1: Get the ingredients
For these DIY wedding favors, you will need:
- Burlap sacks
- Printable Labels
- Peppermint tea, floral tea, and/or coffee beans
- Measuring cup (1/2 cup)
- Printer
- Letter-sized printer paper
Get the labels
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Tips for where to buy supplies
- Burlap sacks: I bought 75 grey burlap sacks from this Amazon seller.
- Labels: I purchased the 2″ x 4″ Avery Shipping Address Labels, template 8163, with 250 labels from Amazon. You can print out the labels I designed here.
- Peppermint tea: I bought bulk peppermint tea from this Amazon seller. You can find bulk peppermint tea in grocery stores, such as Sprouts and your local health food store. (You could grow it, but then these DIY wedding favors would take more than an hour.)
- Floral tea: Loose-leaf tea made from flowers is a more romantic take on tea compared to your quotidian Earl Grey or English Breakfast. I tried mixing my own with dried rose petals, lavender, and marigold flowers. Honestly, it turned out better to buy already blended teas from the grocery store (and it’s way faster). I picked this Blueberry Wild Child tea from Safeway. It has hibiscus, rosehip, and cornflowers.
- Coffee beans: If you’re a connoisseur of coffee, then I don’t need to tell you where to get your beans. I got the Kirkland Signature Starbucks beans from Costco. Fresh and a great deal.
RELATED: Learn more about tea by reading Tea 101.
Substitutions
- Instead of burlap sacks, you can use brown paper bags or tea bags.
- Instead of printable labels, you can use craft paper tags from a craft store like Michaels (you will have to handwrite the tags).
- You can substitute any kind of tea or coffee you desire. Just note that your tea choice may not make sense with the puns on the labels.
- Instead of tea and coffee, you could put sugar and lavender or sugar and rose petals to make a floral simple syrup
- Instead of tea and coffee, you could assemble a herb blend like herbes de provence.
- (If you’re interested in different tea and herb blends, leave a comment and I’ll experiment with recipes to recommend to you.)
Step 2: Make the labels
I created the labels for the burlap sacks using the Avery online label maker software and Canva for the graphics (both tools are free). Download the blank versions and write your names in or leave them blank.
How to print your labels
I have a black and white laser printer. I recommend you download the free labels and print them on plain printer paper first. When doing my trial run on printer paper, I write up and down on each side of the paper so I know which side of the paper was facing up. That way I can tell whether the labels should be facing up when I’m ready to feed in the label sheets.
When I print labels, I configure the printer to use the Media Type: Label and Paper Source: Manual. I keep the Resolution as high as possible and set the Graphics Quality to Graphics. Your printer settings may vary.
If you have a manual mode, I highly recommend you use it for printing labels as it avoids paper jams and increases the chances that your printer stays within the label margins.
How to stick your labels on the bags
Once you’ve printed your labels, stick the labels on the bags first before filling them. I tried it both ways. It’s much faster to stick the labels on a flat surface than it is to stick the label on a rounded pouch with tea or coffee beans inside.
Step 3: Fill the bags
Now you have labeled bags, let’s start filling them with goodies.
Use a 1/2-cup measuring cup to take a scoop of tea or beans and fill your bag. You could use a scale but I don’t care about accuracy, and I want to minimize the amount of work.
To fill the bags faster with less spill, make a DIY funnel. You can repurpose a sheet of printer paper and follow the instructions below to create a funnel.
2. Fold the paper in half again to make it a quarter of its original size.
3. Fold over the shorter edge to make a triangle shape. Keep the middle point of the paper touching the two longest sides of the triangle.
4. Cut the tip off the triangle (the same middle point mentioned in step 3).
5. Tape down the loose edge.
6. Push the paper into a conical shape.
7. If the paper is not staying in a conical shape, you can fold it to force it open.
8. Use the funnel by placing it into your burlap sack.
Fill the bags with the help of the funnel. Then pull and tie the drawstrings in a knot.
Rinse and repeat until you have the desired number of wedding favors for your guests.
Troubleshooting tips
If you want the opening to be wider, cut a bigger hole at the tip.
If the tea is staying in the funnel and refuses to fall into the bag, pull the funnel upwards and shake gently.
2. Gently shake the funnel to encourage the tea to fall into the bag.
3. If it’s still not working, gently lift the funnel upwards to give the tea more room to fall into the bag.
If the drawstring is not closing, don’t yank harder. You will tear the drawstring or rip the bag. Instead, hold the top of the bag and pull one side of the string. Repeat on the other string to close the bag. Tie the knot.
And you’re done
This wedding favors tutorial should be a quick and easy way to check off another item on your to-do list, so that you have more bandwidth to focus your hair, makeup, and seating charts.
Good luck and congratulations on your upcoming nuptials.
FAQ about DIY edible favors
How much do these favors cost?
- Commit-Mint Tea Favors: ~95¢ per gift (15¢ label*, 30¢ burlap sack, 50¢ tea)
- Flower Power Tea Favors: ~$1.88 per gift (15¢ label, 30¢ burlap sack, $1.43 tea**)
- Meant To Bean Coffee Favors: ~97¢ per gift (15¢ label, 30¢ burlap sack, 52¢ coffee**)
*I split the cost over the number of labels I used, not the whole 250
** Flower power tea favors are costlier – you may more for the uniqueness
*** Depends on the kind of coffee you get
Is there a cheaper, less wasteful option?
If you find burlap sacks too wasteful or too expensive, substitute sacks with DIY tea bags and twine to close the bags. I bought a box of 100 loose-leaf tea filters for $6 in the tea aisle at Safeway. Plus these materials are compostable.
Using tea filters are convenient for the tea drinker to simply dunk the tea bag in water. It doesn’t work so great with coffee beans so you’ll want to use ground coffee or stick with tea.
Are the labels too big?
Yes, a tad. I used what supplies I had on hand but I would probably get smaller labels next time. If you want me to redesign the printables and test out smaller labels, please leave a comment to let me know.
If you want any changes or customizations to this tutorial, leave a comment below.
Did you use this tutorial to make your wedding favors? If so, email me a photo at anna@garlicdelight.com.
I have to admit that I would most likely put most weeding favors in a drawer and never look at them again but I really like the ones you made actually :). They don’t feel like something you are giving because you have to but you clearly put lots of thoughts into making them.