Ivanhoe Caleonian will begin production at a second factory in Edinburgh at the start of next year thanks to a £1.6 million lockdown investment.
This is equipping the new plant with a six-colour Komori Lithone LSX640 and a full range of equipment capable of finishing cartons. This includes a new Petratto Metro folder gluer, Baumann pile turner and Foliant Pollux B1 laminator all from IFS; two Cylinders, one for die cutting, the other for foiling from Senior Graphics; binding line, stitcher and folder from CS Bindery Solutions and a guillotine from Roberts Graphics, which also supplied the Komori.
“We have been buying quite a bit of equipment over the last few months,” says Ivanhoe Caledonian director Keith Cockburn. This is now being delivered to a site a few miles from the first factory at Musselburgh, which will continue as a B2 litho operation. Other items of finishing equipment will be moved so that the new site will focus on carton and longer commercial work.
“We have also been producing some very bespoke case bound work and rigid presentation boxes,” he says. Until now the company has had to use trade suppliers, relinquishing control and flexibility which it will gain through in house production.
The company had been increasing the volume of cartons produced in recent years and had anticipated reaching parity between packaging and commercial work sometime in the next decade. Brexit has hastened this process.
“Customers were asking us for cartons because they had been let down by suppliers in China,” he says. “We were getting them begging us to help, otherwise they would not have been able to send out products to their customers.”
Rather than invest the whole pot on a new press, the team decided on a full suite of equipment for carton production, checking every decision with others in the market. The Petratto was typical. Cockburn says: “We were recommended the Petratto by IFS. When we looked more closely it pipped others because of what it can do for us. It was more refined, easy to set up and user friendly for the team. We also liked the fast crash locking capability.”
Ivanhoe Caledonian is the result of merger in 2017. It has by default become that last litho man standing in the Scotland’s capital city, certainly the only printer with B1 capability.
It is targeting companies in Scotland’s food and drink sector, where quality rules over quantity, so orders are below those that large packaging companies require. “If one of these customers needs something within week, the machine we have now gives us the flexibility to do that, which the big boys find difficult.
“We have customers that want 100 rigid boxes by the end of the week. We can get that produced and out to them. We see our position as the flexible guy able to help these sorts of businesses out.”
Many of those that Cockburn is aiming at also want to shorten and reduce risk in their supply chains, as well as to be able to claim that all parts of what they sell has been made in Scotland.
The company has taken advantage of government support, both from Scotland and the UK, to set up the new operation using finance from both Close Asset Finance and Compass Business Finance. It has been able to recruit skilled personnel released as the companies they had been working from reorganised or closed.
“We can keep these people in jobs and retain the skills in the industry, keeping those skills alive, when they might have dropped out of the industry. I started working at Waddies and feel now that we are the successors to that Edinburgh business and have the passion to do that.”
And as the management team is around 40 years old, it can take a 20-year view of business strategy. That certainly includes growth, both organic and through acquisition.
More immediately there is the need to get Seafield Way up and running. The next stage will be BRC accreditation, among other certificates, that are needed by any carton printer. “We are not finished yet. This is just the start.”
