Packaging up a digital future

Dr Liz Wilks, European Director, Asia Pulp & Paper Group (APP)

Visiting Drupa, the world’s largest trade fair for graphic and industrial print last month and you might be tempted to think a name change to Drupack could be on the cards for the 2020 event, such is the sheer amount of crossover between print and packaging applications in today’s industry.

Given the well-established role of quality print design in making the difference between a package that leaps off the shelves and one that gathers dust, this shouldn’t be a huge surprise. What’s making the difference today is the increasing flexibility of the machines on offer, enabling printers to broaden the types of application and the substrates that they can tackle, meaning that offering packaging alongside graphical print is a tempting offer for many a future-looking printer.

The other factor of course is the continued rise of digital printing and nowhere was this more evident than Drupa, arguably symbolic of an industry that is slowly shifting more and more towards digital printing as printers seek to unlock a prospect that Smithers Pira believe could be worth more than $14 billion by 2018.

Drupa was filled to the rafters with examples; HP occupied an entire hall, showcasing no fewer than 56 different presses, and the launch of the HP PageWide C500 Press, a high-speed inkjet designed for board and capable of producing everything from corrugated packaging through to displays with inks designed for food-compliant packaging. Sheetfed offfset titan, Heidelberg presented Primefire, a digital press designed to revolutionise digital carton printing – what is effectively an untapped market for printers and packagers to explore.

Meanwhile, Benny Landa was back, this time with working presses and a choreographed display that would give anything in the consumer goods industry a run for its money. The promise of Landa is its Nanographic Printing process, which it claims will combine the performance of offset with the flexibility of digital printing. The idea, if it works, is to make digital printing truly economically viable for those print jobs, especially common in the packaging industry that have run lengths that stretch beyond the scope of current digital printing presses, but are not quite long enough for efficient offset printing – the uncomfortable middle ground of a medium run length.

The appeal of a digital press that can handle medium length runs for a printer is that it means more flexibility and greater scope to take on more work, but in my view, the bigger picture is really about what it could mean for the future of the industry. This is about the potential for taking personalised packaging out of the world of marketing stunts and into the mainstream.

This is a market with big potential as brands try to cut through the marketing noise. Coca-Cola’s “Share A Coke” campaign, which relied on named bottles of Coca-Cola credits its personalised packaging with helping it to boost sales across Europe. Mondelez has been using digital presses to turn out personalised Oreo packages in the US, an initiative it has now expanded to China. Meanwhile Heinz has been effectively taking on the ‘get well soon’ card market by turning out personalised cans of Heinz soup with a get well message for single order.

The challenge with all three examples however is that current limitations around costs and the physical location of digital printing presses, means that they have some way to go before truly representing the mainstream. As Sean Smyth of Smithers Pira quipped to the Financial Times on personalised soup cans “The only problem is that it takes three to five days and by that time you are either well or dead,”

The new generation of digital presses showcased at Drupa should help to resolve the cost issue. The next challenge is physical, locating enough digital presses close enough to satisfy consumer demand in the timeframes expected. That’s unrealistic at the moment given volumes for FMCG packaging, but it is a realistic prospect for luxury packaging, characterised by lower volumes, strong competition and high premiums.

Personalised luxury packs would tap into the established trend for personalised luxury as brands seek to differentiate for ever wealthier and more discerning customers. What digital printing could do is bring personalisation through packaging to a much larger, if not quite mass market. It raises the prospect of customised gifts where customising the gift itself is not cost effective, and it could be a major differentiator to brands that target wealthier demographics and maintain tighter control over distribution – Apple as a singular example or the wave of subscription services that are seeking to revolutionise the consumption of staples such as razors, coffee and beauty products. The appeal of a subscription service is that it is tailored to the user, adding customised packaging will take this relationship to the next level.

For producers of packaging materials, the growth of digital printing raises some interesting questions.  Flexibility in print applications, will be matched in a need for flexibility in materials, so in board we can expect the use of an increasing diverse variety of grammages and finishes as printers look to tailor each job. Packaging materials will also need to ensure that they stay relevant, building the conversation around how high quality paper and board can complement a truly unique packaging design and help it to achieve that crucial degree of shelf standout.

As printing becomes increasingly digital, it’s time to consider at what point each package gains the potential to be entirely unique and how brands can make us of this capability effectively. Digital printing is rapidly unlocking that capability, it is now up to packaging material businesses and printers to work with brands to communicate what it could mean.