Page 35 - Print21 magazine Mar-Apr 2023

Business
Foils remain the primary way to elevate a brand, whether drinks or food, into a luxury bracket. And the cost is not high. Leading producer Foilco reckons that foil applied to
a label can add something like 0.01 cents to the cost of that label. It is a small price to pay for what generates a big impact. “The value is what that foil brings to a product. If as a result someone picks the product from the shelf, the research shows they are 30 per cent more likely to put it in their basket. The task is to get the consumer to pick your product from the shelf,” the supplier says. An eye catching or intriguingly designed label stands a good chance of doing that.
This is demonstrated in the burgeoning artisan beer market. Micro brewers rely on imaginative
names for their products supported by equally striking labels. Competition for a drinker’s attention is fierce and it is the label, applied
to bottle or can, that can help the
ale stand out. And for micro brewers digital printing is the ideal way to test these designs, making adjustments that are impossible in established brands in order to find the design that consumers identify with.
SUSTAINABLE
Increasingly consumers want to be associated with products and brands that are sustainable. Legislation to outlaw single use plastic is in place across Europe and other countries will surely follow. The FMCG retail sector has been on top of this for some years, kicked off by leading chain Marks & Spencer’s Plan A,
Labels: Telling a story to consumers
which is to limit packaging to one type of plastic only. Retailers across Europe have followed. Among the M&S targets is that 100 per cent of packaging should be recyclable by 2025.
While converters need to respond to customers, they can prepare for the sustainability squeeze that is coming. Finat, the organisation for the pressure sensitive label sector
in Europe, has been providing guidance to its members about the environmental impact of what they produce. Brands must be seen to be doing the right thing and this means that their supply chain must likewise provide full transparency and auditable figures on environmental performance.
Finat has provided its members with guides to help calculate the Life Cycle Assessment of selfadhesive labels and has teamed up with label stock producers Avery Dennison, Ritrama, Hema and UPM to create
a recycling loop for back liner and unwanted matrix materials. It aims to be able to recover and recycle 75 per cent of this material used across Europe by 2025.
Printers can also switch to purchasing energy from renewable sources, or cutting energy use
in other ways to demonstrate environmentally minded behaviour.
TRANSITION
This is happening rapidly through the wholesale transition of curing technology from mercury vapour fluorescent lamps to LEDs. GEW is a major supplier of LEDs to label printers (thanks to an easy to fit air cooled system which uses the same infrastructure as the lamp system
it supersedes) and its factory has been stacked out producing these units, selling as many as it can produce.
The European label groups, and there is a growing number, are switching not only their inkjet presses to work with LED UV, but also their flexo presses to the less energy intensive technology.
The move though is away from flexo, led by shorter print runs to reduce the risk of holding stock that becomes out of date and has to be pulped. Retail competition is driving a proliferation
of SKUs both in new products and package sizes. It adds up to good business for label converters, provided of course that they can hit those sustainability targets.
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