Tony’s Chocolonely is on a mission. It wants to eliminate child labour in West Africa. It wants to end modern slavery. All via the medium of chocolate. This is a passion that Precision Proco shares. It wants to help Tony Chocolonely’s mission via the medium of personalised print. Put together and the result is a personalised wrapper for the distinctive chocolate brand.
Tony’s story began in Amsterdam and the company has permeated the confectionery world as the ultimate challenger brand. It wants to fight its way to a seat at the top table where the likes of Nestlé, Kraft Foods, Lindt & Sprüngli and others sit to discuss all things cocoa. Once there it will impress upon the chocolate aristocracy that children should not be employed in the forests where cocoa beans are farmed. Tony’s calculates that 1.56 million kids work in this way with a further 30,000 instances of modern slavery. “According to research, only 40% of the UK population know this,” says Tony’s Chocolonely’s UK&I head of marketing Nicola Matthews. The mission is to change perceptions using a personalised bar of chocolate. “We want to provide a joy bringing product and also one that helps people to be more conscious of these facts,” she says.
The inside wrapper of every bar of Tony’s Chocolonely describes the situation for chocolate lovers to read, but Tony’s is only a small brand compared to those that put returns to shareholders above corporate good. It has to create a greater impact if it is to succeed, hence the project to use print to make that impact personal.
Jon Tolley, chief innovation officer of Precision Proco, says: “The drive that Tony’s is on is just as important to us. We want to get the message out there.”
Tony’s began to offer personalised wrappers via its online store around six years ago working with a Wihabo, a Dutch HP Indigo user. It proved successful and the company looked for the next country to conquer, extending the offer to chocolate lovers in the UK. “We launched the personalised offer in the UK in 2020, fulfilling the demand from the Netherlands,” says Hannah Groom, direct sales manager for the UK. “But this became really complex after 1 January 2021 because of Brexit. Orders were delayed at customs, costs increased and we could not guarantee a service level for customers. We started looking for a UK partner. It was a massive project.”
The personalised wrappers are crucial to the Tony’s mission. It is a way to get the message out to more people who perhaps have not previously sampled the brand. “We are an impact company,” says Matthews. “We only exist because we want to make chocolate 100% slave free.” Personalisation, especially through gifting, is key to this. It gets the bars into the hands of consumers who might then pick up on the messaging. “Personalisation is something that can drive brand awareness and is something that is proven to resonate with consumers in the Netherlands and the UK,” she adds.
So having started to supply the UK, it has been crucial to carry on. Precision Proco through DScoop was already in touch with Wihabo and knew the story of the personalised wrappers. “We’d spoken to Joris (technical director Joris Bosch) about what might happen with Brexit and said that if ever he needed any support, we would be able to help. He approached us,” says Tolley.
The project needed more than competence in operating an HP Indigo press. This is rather more challenging than printing and dispatching photobooks, though the print run of one workflow developed for that product is one of the building blocks for this project. Toney’s Chocolonely had to be reassured that Precision Proco was able to deliver the quality assurance, the compliance issues around handling food and then that it had the capacity to grow. It needed to be able to print on 100% recycled Cocoon Offset 100gsm which has both FSC and EU Ecolabel certification and is used to wrap the bars.
Having met these outline requirements, the detailed phase of the project could begin.
Tolley explains: “This was about understanding the nature of the workflow, how the order is received, how the data presents itself, how we interrogate that data to get the correct bar to the correct individual. This is far more than a simple print product.”
Precision Proco chose to handle the project from Sheffield. It has a B2 Indigo 12000 to print the wrappers and has the experience of completing this sort of job for other customers. “We have to make sure that a milk chocolate wrapper is not put on a bar of chocolate with hazelnuts. That is a potentially harmful mistake to make,” he adds.
The purchaser has pretty much free rein with design over the entire wrapper with the exception of the back where the ingredients and other essential information is printed. This is not set in stone: should the ingredients change, the artwork has to be updated instantly. Likewise recipes can be adjusted and that information has to be updated at once. Initially there were nine flavours available online, increasing to 12 and potentially to 14 or more. Then there is the possibility of introducing vegan versions for another layer of complexity for Precision Proco to manage.
Everything is tracked through a 5mm barcode unique to each order. “This contains all the information we need about the bars and the orders,” Tolley says. The codes are scanned to make sure the correct flavour is matched with the appropriate order in its food secure handling area. The wrappers have been printed and guillotined by this stage. Once linked to the right flavour, a dedicated machine creates an envelope style enclosure around the bar. If by chance there is a mismatch between the assigned flavour and the printed wrap, everything stops.
Quite simply this has to work every time. Wihabo has contributed to how Precision Proco does this just as Precision Proco has made suggestions to the Dutch company in turn.
“This assurance that the flavour and wrap would always match is as important to us as print quality. The process has to be perfect,” says Groom.
The advantage of the Indigo 12000 is that it can pretty much match any colour thrown at it thanks to printing with up to six colours. The B2 format provides greater efficiencies through imposition than using the smaller presses in the range.
The extra colours enable Precision Proco, like Wihabo, to match the corporate colours that Tony’s Chocolonely uses (communicated using hex codes) as well as satisfying the imaginations of customers. “The design can be as unique as the customer wants to make it,” says Groom. That includes the ability to upload and use images, or for corporate customers a company logo, to select from suggested messages or to come with their own. A reality check ensures certain messages are beyond the pale and do not make it to the print stage.
The customer can work within the templates or the interactive tools that the company provides on the website or can download the schematic of the wrapper and work offline using Adobe’s InDesign or Illustrator applications to perfect the design before uploading again as a PDF. This has more appeal to corporate clients than to individuals who are less likely to have access to Creative Cloud or similar tools to produce one-off bespoke designs.
“We don’t just want to offer that level of customisation on bars,” she continues. “We want to expand to the packaging inserts as well and on to all sorts of other products.”
Her colleague takes up the strategy: “Because we can do something bespoke it opens a world of possible partnerships. We could team up and commission an artist to create a Tony’s chocolate bar to be part of competitions on social media. There are no restrictions,” says Matthews. Minimum order quantity is a single bar, maximum (though never reached) is 25,000.
In turn that excites Tolley. “My remit is to come up with more creative ideas for our business. We love working with Tony’s. This lets us work with the entire business, from marketing through to corporate sales as well as production.
“This has included working closely with Wihabo and we continue to work closely together. For me this collaboration between client and printer and across the DScoop network is the most exciting aspect. What we are doing is not unique. These are challenges that exist every day and for businesses around the world. This is about how we solve those problems for brands and how we speed up the process. Print is the element that can drive the solution. It’s faster to work with a printer than a marketing agency, providing innovative solutions to the problem that can be rolled out more quickly.”
That is what happened in this case. Tony’s Chocolonely had the idea and worked with Wihabo on how to execute and deliver that idea around six years ago, says Groom. It was followed by presentations at DSscoop, leading directly to contact with Precision Proco.
DScoop has developed radically from origins as an Indigo user group that met to discuss the technology and applications under HP’s protective wing. Today DScoop is self managed with HP taking something of a paternal interest but not interfering. It is about networking across the community covering both the Indigo and PageWide technologies. “Our job,” says UK & Ireland general manager Peter Jolly, “is to let the conversations happen and DScoop is really important for that. This is the perfect story, a great example where two companies across different regions have been able to work together.
“This it’s one of the first collaborations of this size and scale to come through DScoop. That makes it significant.”
It is also a pay off for the marketing work that HP has done in talking to marketing agencies and brands about the effectiveness of digital printing and partnerships – “a grown up approach to business” Jolly calls it. Those conversations have been supported by work to prove that the inks used in the Indigo technology are food safe.
Now he says the demarcation lines between commercial print and HP’s labels and packaging division are becoming blurred. “Tony’s is in the nature of the sorts of project we find in the commercial print space and which will become more commonplace. Traditional packaging is getting its head around digital printing and to achieve the speed that is needed from the supply chain, digital print is needed. Commercial printing by its nature tends to be highly competitive and the best companies are innovators; Precision Proco is one of the best examples. That innovation will find its way through to packaging, which is why Tony’s is a great message for us and underlines what we have been saying for many, many years.”
The project is now poised for rapid growth. Tony’s has recently launched personalisation in Germany to follow on from the UK and the US. Says Groom: “Personalisation is one of our most significant growth areas, especially for the UK. It is a big strategic focus and continues to be, not just for revenue growth but for brand awareness and awareness of the message about what we stand for. And via personalised products to bring joy. We want to grow this by 30% next year, we can cope with that and can scale for that. When people receive their bar from a friend through the post it is both surprising and delightful.”
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