Packaging Innovations continues to attract a diverse and sometimes eclectic audience to its springtime show at the NEC.
The event, which includes Empack and Labels and Labelling, is spread over two halls in Birmingham, and covers the gamut packaging from metal and glass to paper and plastics; it includes label printing and other machinery as well as those offering contract packaging services. But the main attraction are the services on offer from printers and converters.
And digital printing has arrived. Glossop Cartons has its online personalised carton production service up and running as has Alexir, while CS Labels could point to digital printing of stand up pouches, in both paper and plastic.
“It is not about cheap packaging,” says Alexir sales manager Chris Fuller. “It is giving us opportunities for our customers to do consumer based testing or preproduction trials.” The company installed a Xerox iGen with Tresu coater and Kama ProCut die cutter, supplied by Friedheim International, for the venture and has produced work for food brand Gü among others.
“We produced 50 sample packs of each product in their new range so that they could present them to retailers,” he says. “It gives them the opportunity to display the real packs as they would look like on the shelf.”
As well as desserts, Alexir is working for tea brands where short batch production of specialist teas works well on a high value product, and for product launches. “As a rule of thumb, if it is up to 2,000 units, it will go to the digital press, if more it goes down the litho route,” says Fuller.
While digital is not cheap, for a multi Sku launch it can quickly become cost effective. “A ten-Sku line would require 60 plates down the conventional litho route, but with digital there are no plates required.”
Glossop’s approach includes personalised packaging printed through its Xeikon 3500 press. It can be finished on a Highcon, combining short run creasing dies and laser cutting. At the show there were samples disguised as folded trucks each with different messaging and holding a handful of sweets.
The company is launching a personalised packaging website in a bid to become the “Moonpig for cartons”. This will attract customers from the smaller businesses or individuals who want boxes for a wedding, for example. At the same time Glossop director Jacky Sidebottom-Every says the business is talking to big brands about using digital printing for marketing promotions.
“We can do on-pack competitions with alpha-numeric numbering. We can do sampling and for anything up to 2,000 cartons. Digital is more effective than litho,” she says. “It means that someone can launch a brand at low cost and with reduced risk.
“It is still a very new market and while people have been talking about it for so long, they still need to think about how they can use digital printing. It is about giving brands the confidence to use digital printing and develop from that.”
CS Labels has acquired two key customers for digital production: a pet foods company where the foil pouches of dog food can have images of the breed it is intended for and online snack provider Graze which supplies a mix of nuts and seeds personalised to its customers.
Managing director Simon Smith finds that the speed of turnaround that his line up of Xeikon presses can deliver is key. “The lead times we can offer are much faster than sourcing packaging from China,” he says. “And we can cope with versionable short runs. We are the only Xeikon house in Europe that has this solution.”
The company has developed an approach to printing on plastics that does not require Xeikon’s low fusing temperature ICE toner and is using this for clear transfer labels that can be applied to glass or ceramics with much higher quality than screen printing can offer. This can be applied at 120ºC rather than 600ºC which is helping drive interest, says Smith. “It means that there can be a lot of energy saving as well as higher quality artwork.” He has a sample for a hairspray product with a delicate image of an intricate hair formation. “It has to be a premium value product,” he adds.
The sampling theme was extensive with AC/CAD showing a Dyss cutting table and Zund with its S3 model model for cutting out multiple cartons. There was also a smaller Mimaki on i-Sub Digital’s stand where the main focus was on the Mimaki UJF7151 Plus, a flatbed printing making its debut at a UK show. The dealer plans to return to the NEC with it for Sign & Digital next month.
The printer has a 710x510mm bed and new print heads firing UV LED cured inks vertically on to the substrate. It delivers very high quality output. It will also print an adhesive which was used by i-Sub to define an area for applying a foil.
In a first generation of the Digifoil application, the foil had to be applied with a hand held heated roller which might result in variable quality. Now the fold is placed over the image area and the sheet fed through a desktop laminator which results in a sharp even finish. The non necessary foil is lifted away.
It means greater opportunity for agencies and brands to come up with new styles of packaging for their customers, in turn driving demand from carton printers. Digital is knocking on the door of the packaging industry.
The Packaging Innovations show and its sister event attracted a diverse spread of visitors to the NEC last week to peer at packaging and especially to understand the opportunities presented by digital production of cartons and other packaging.
