Guy Colebourne has a vision. One day the Friday night Chinese or Indian takeaway will no longer be a guessing game about what lies beneath the card lids with a number or indecipherable message scrawled on them. One day these lids will be printed with the image of the food beneath or at least the name of the dish and perhaps that of the restaurant providing the meal.
He is not holding his breath, but Colebourne & Partners, the company he runs in Melksham, has taken its first step in this direction. It is the first carton producer to be running the UK’s Xeikon 3500 exclusively on board. The press is in extensive use for label production and is used elsewhere for carton work, but never before in the UK. It was shipped in a year ago and has been helping change perceptions about packaging ever since. It runs alongside a GM finishing line which offers flexo printing, coating, lamination, die cutting currently and could offer foiling and other functions in future.
A carton gluer will join the set up this summer and the longer term plan is to have a second Xeikon, perhaps a duplex machine, running alongside the first. The development brings a complete change in focus for the company. It was started by Guy’s parents 40 years ago as a wholesale provider of packaging to the trade. Among those items were the lids for the takeaway food business, rapidly becoming the largest supplier of lids to the Asian and South East restaurant trade. Lids for ready meal providers followed along with other packaging items.
The company installed Iberica die cutting and laminating in order to finish cartons that had been printed elsewhere. It had at one time looked at investment in a Heidelberg, but with suppliers keen to offer tight prices, there was no need. Guaranteed on time delivery, however, proved another issue. C&P grew to be a tidy business occupying 17,000sq ft of factory space on an industrial estate on the edge of the Wiltshire town.
Guy Colebourne joined the family business after the death of his father 12 years ago. He had been working in an internet consultancy in London, but sold up and drove back along the M4, bringing an understanding of the way the world was changing with him. He started looking seriously at digital printing about six years ago, at a time when production speeds were too low. Then he began to revisit the idea, looking at the technology on offer and framing the vision of the business.
While the company had a limited number of SKUs in terms of lid size, there can be hundreds of variations of these standard products amounting to £150,000 or more of stock held ready for call off by customers. When designs changed, pallets of printed material would need to be recycled.
He says: “Every year we sit down with our customers and stock was raised as a big issue while another was the speed of processing changes to artwork. Every new PDF would need checking and sign off which had become a lengthy and expensive process and a pinch point. They no longer have to plan production 12 weeks in advance, but can print on demand.”
The answer was digital printing on demand would eliminate the waste from overstocking, the costs of storage, and cut time to market for new designs. These could be approved online and uploaded by customers who would manage their own content, meaning there was no longer a problem about what was being printed.
This also answered the desire from the marketing department to refresh brands and launch product variants which would run into the sands of the purchasing department and cost control. Working digitally there are no plates to purchase, no proofs to inspect and manage, testing a new product, or variants of a new product, becomes straightforward. And minimum order quantities could be in hundreds rather than tens of thousands.
The company has made a big investment in a database driven web front end which holds the customer artwork and enables almost instant updating when ingredients change or legislation demands. If for example the law states that calorie counts must be shown in bold, just one change to the database will update all the artwork held. Changes can be needed if a raw ingredient is replaced for some reason, or a warning has to be added for those with allergies. Working in the analogue world this means throwing out any now out of date stock and rushing through reprints to compensate. Colebourne estimates that as much of 10-15% of a stock holding might never be used.
Now the way is open to change designs seasonally, a sprig of holly to mark Christmas for instance, or to include promotional messaging. Online ordering of small batches like this is also a way for smaller businesses to level the playing field with the largest companies that are able to order in large quantities. “We are really looking for jobs that it is not possible to do conventionally,” he explains. Ideally the company could be supplying hundreds or thousands of customers with short run orders.
The digital warehouse has replaced the stock of cartons and only what is needed is produced, down to the nearest 250 cartons, this being the number in a shrink wrapped stack that the company produces.
The IT is crucial to the business model, the editing, the web interface, interaction with the data base and integration with the client’s business management application. “A purchase order can be raised in their SAP system, can flow into our system and be printed with no further re entry of data,” Colebourne says. The software he explains is based on that more usually used for running online greetings card applications.
The finishing line is equally important. It is a reelfed system which was built to the company’s specifications and consequently the exact configuration and capabilities are tightly guarded. Suffice to say it adds a coating to the top of a carton and laminates a polyester film to its base if for the ready meal market, but can window patch, die cut as well as coat for other customers.
Colebourne had experience of working with sheets with the way the business had been set up previously, but the switch to reels was not a difficult decision to make. Previously pallets of cartons could be accidentally knocked over while waiting for processing. “There were lots of opportunities for waste and for things to go wrong,” he says. “This is much better with a reeled operation where the cartons are packed immediately they come off the line.”
When it came to specifying the printing machine, sheetfed was quickly ruled out, leaving a tough choice between HP Indigo and Xeikon. The Belgian company won out for a number of reasons. First, its toner is FDA approved and meets the Swiss ordinances for low migration, both in terms of coloured toners and the clear toner should it be required. As the majority of the work is in the food area, this was crucial. Second, with a start up project, Colebourne liked the access to all levels in the company that <a href="http://bit.ly/20VeW0U"
target=”_new”>Xeikon offered and perhaps most importantly, there was no need to add a priming coat before printing, which would have meant an unwanted additional process and therefore cost.
Despite the large consumption of toner, it can get through a bottle in less than half an hour on some jobs, Colebourne calculated that a click charge method would be better for the business, at least at the start. It would give better visibility to the costs and cut out any unknowns relating to toner use.
Now the Xeikon 3500 runs for at least 11 hours a day, printing at a steady 19.2 metres a minute regardless of subject matter. It prints and rewinds rather than running inline to the finishing line. The finishing system will run twice the speed of the press, so can eventually service two presses. It also allows for production to continue should one element have a problem.
A typical job might contain multiple variants of the same template for one customer, 2,000 of this product, 33,000 of this, and a job could stay on press for a full 11 hours. The company schedules its work so that the week starts with the widest reels on press, 514mm across and as the days progress narrower reels are used. This makes transitions from one width to the next smoother and less disruptive to production.
If a rush order comes in, print today for delivery in the afternoon, or tomorrow, the set up can cope as the press is only in operation for two shifts. “Our ability to respond like this is a critical factor,” says Colebourne. “We leave the third shift open for what we call ‘screamers’.”
It remains early days for the digital transition, but conversations are interesting, says Colebourne. It is working with one customer which supplies health foods direct to the desks of office workers, who have specified what they want to eat online through an annual subscription. All the elements for personalised packaging are in place – name, contents and address. Initially the personalisation will occur during the trial period to encourage sign up for the annual subscription, but might easily be extended to reduce the elements that a carton has to contain by using on pack digital printing. The cost of the pack will increase, but this will be offset against the costs of the leaflets and other items that have to be included. Barcodes could identify which food packs to include in each box, bringing a further saving to the customer.
“We had one of their designers here working with us for three hours on press testing different designs,” says Colebourne. “Ordinarily, he told us, what he achieved would have taken four separate trips.”
Should this take off and the customer moves to print all his cartons in this way, Colebourne & Partners will be producing another 300,000 boxes a week, putting the press on to three shift operation. And the dream will take another step towards reality.
Colebourne & Partners is producing digitally printed lids and packaging for food companies on its Xeikon 3500 and has a strategy to expand into the fast food sector, says Guy Colebourne (left) with production manager Mulcahy.
