‘The world is changing, that much is obvious,’ states Peter Barton, managing director at Reprocad.

Specifically, he notes the world of product marketing as undergoing a transformation.

He explains, ‘Product lifecycles are shortening. Ten years ago, it would be possible to have a product in the product catalogue for a year or two, so marketers would print thousands of catalogues using lithographic print. Nowadays, product may only be in the catalogue for 3-6 months before there are ‘new, improved’ versions. This then renders thousands of catalogues and brochures obsolete.

‘This type of marketing is moving to purely digital, online, documentation, or digital short-run prints.’

Packaging is no different, with specifications and ingredients for products changing rapidly, health and safety legislation evolving, and globalisation increasing year-on-year. The drive to ecologically sound practices will focus attention on wastage created by pale making, and make-ready print wastage.

The ‘suppressed’ market

Mr Barton says, ‘There is a huge, hidden, market opportunity, which is being suppressed by minimum order quantities (MOQs) for short-run promotions and personalisation of packaging. Digital print is perfect for prototyping, market trials and emerging markets, which may be slow starters.

‘There are also real-time opportunities to exploit news items (royal births, political elections, local events, etc), which are not possible with outsourced traditional print methods due to the lead time of the printed material.

‘Bringing digital print in-house with the packaging lines is the only way to achieve this,’ he states.

Identifying the potential in numbers, Mr Barton says that the total market for digital labelling and packaging is forecast to be around $23 billion by 2022, which is some five percent of the total market value. Digital print to flexibles, meanwhile, is growing by around 17% year-on-year. Flexible packaging, in general, is growing due to consumer demand. In a survey carried out by Harris Poll on behalf of the Flexible Packaging Association in North America, 81% of 35-44 year olds said they preferred flexible packaging over non-flexible packaging.

The role of digital print in packaging

‘It should be remembered that digital printing should not be seen as a replacement for analogue print, but more as an adjunct to analogue print – allowing tasks to be undertaken that were impossible before, and also taking the load off the expensive analogue presses for the shorter runs and quicker turnarounds required by the modern market; this can improve efficiency by focusing the big presses on more suitable jobs.

‘Other benefits include the generally smaller footprint of digital printers, allowing the activity to be shoehorned into existing production space, and the lower training requirement for operators, which could be as short as a day or two.’

He continues, ‘Any discussions about new technology will eventually hone in on one topic – affordability. Up to now, large digital presses have had large price tags to suit; the Rigoli MVZ printer offers medium-run production with a lower capital cost. Running costs can be measure in terms of run lengths and will be shown to be cost effective up to a certain break-point of print volume.’

The MVZ printer was designed by Rigoli to meet customer demand, such as a coffee producer in Italy, supplying ‘mom-and-pop-shops’ across the country with beans, ground coffee, Nespresso pods, Lavazza Mio pods, and more. As all the coffee shops wanted their own, personalised packs, this equated to 1400 SKUs. This entailed buying in masses of printed media and putting in place warehousing controls to ensure that stocks were held, with the appropriate media rolls being pulled from stock for each production run. To negate this, digital print inline with VFFS was sought, and the MVZ was born.

‘The initial line was so successful that two other lines were converted to digital by the addition of an MVZ machine,’ says Mr Barton. There is the intention to convert the remaining two lines also, while the first Rigoli MVZ1000 has been installed by Reprocad in the UK at Chartley Coffee, and is being used to print roll-to-roll flexible packaging for coffee and tea.

Mr Barton examples, ‘After installing the MVZ1000 printer, on the first day of production running, Chartley Coffee accepted a bag design from a new customer in the morning, printed in the afternoon, filled the next morning, and the customer collected the order in the afternoon How else could this have been achieved?.

He adds, ‘Many converters and manufacturers have a range of different package sizes. In this case, a more efficient working practice was to print roll-to-roll to enable the rolls to be used on many different packaging machines. The accurately wound jumbo unwinders were developed for the MVZ printer in response to this demand.

‘A sugar sachet manufacturer was the first to adopt this methodology, whereby a roll of 905mm is printed and then fed into a pouch maker that folds in half then slits into 10 channels and produces 4g sugar bags.’

Application scenarios

Speaking with packaging professionals in different industries, Reprocad and Mr Barton have revealed several pressure points in the flexible packaging market, including:

  • A candy manufacturer with a global presence is experiencing issues with an emerging market, with constant requests from would-be distributors and initial orders that are quite small, but require packaging in local language, with local addresses and regulations. The cost of the MOQ of printed material for the packaging of this order will often exceed the value of the order. This forces a decision on whether it is worth following up on this opportunity;
  • A major health food supplier is handling all aspects of packaging in-house, with the exception of printing. With hundreds of SKUs, the main pressure point is the lead time on printed materials, which can be as long as three months. This makes the logistics planning a headache for the production department;
  • A bird seed manufacturer and importer sells through garden centres and major online distributors who all sell under own-brand packaging. This creates many SKUs and the attendant logistics headache of outsourced print, with long lead times and MOQs. It should be mentioned that, in some cases, even when ordering the MOQ, that company may not be considered by the commercial printer as a ‘priority customer’ as the value of the print orders may not be considered as large as some of that printer’s other business; this can lead to being pushed back in the production queue; and
  • A packaging converter, producing work for the major supermarkets, is often asked to produce short-run work for events, holidays, promotions, competitions and many other ideas dreamed up by the supermarkets’ marketing departments.
  • The four scenarios above are quite typical, says Mr Barton, and can be visualised in many other market sectors; in fact, any activity packaging premium goods into flexible packaging.

Technologies such as the Rigoli MVZ range provide options for these scenarios, and more.

The MVZ range is currently available in a wide-format 1067mm print width, and printing at nine or 18 linear metres per minute. Future models will be configurable from 300mm up to 1.2m, and printing at 27 to 46 linear metres per minute. Rigoli is also already in collaboration with several FFS machine manufacturers, with integration and synchronisation services available.

‘Future model MVZ printers will even be fast enough to integrate to horizontal flow wrap machines,’ notes Mr Barton. They will also be able to run at high speed and be integrated alongside label applicators.

FP-230 from Afinia Label offers similar capability, having been introduced earlier this year as the world’s first desktop flexible packaging press. While restricted to a much smaller web width – 230mm maximum media width – FP-230 can likewise be integrated inline with packaging machinery, which sees inkjet printed, laminated and rewound rolls fed into VFFS/HFFS machines, such as the Multipak Rapid 190 VFFS bagging machine from Iris Packaging, to create on-demand flexible packaging.

Joe Collins, responsible for technical sales at Afinia Label, says. ‘As companies have focused on things like reducing waste, smaller production runs, and increasing personalisation in recent years, the need for an on-demand flexible packaging solution has grown significantly.’

Mr Barton continues, ‘Integrating into a production line reduces waiting times, operator intervention, changeover times, etc., but ties up one printer per line, whereas printing roll-to-roll allows one printer to feed several different lines.’

Running cots are always a key topic too, he adds, and whilst digital print ‘cannot compete’ with conventional print processes for huge print runs, the breakeven point in terms of costs can be much higher than it would initially appear. Couple this with the multiple drivers towards digitalisation, such as personalisation, flexibility and process streamlining, and Mr Barton sees, ‘As an adjunct to conventional (analogue) processes, there is a real place for a digital, affordable printer with small footprint in the flexible packaging market.

‘Many of the problems faced by conventional processes can be overcome.’

Read more about personalisation in the March/April issue of Digital Labels & Packaging, and more on digital flexible package printing in May/June; register here to receive the magazine