PETpla.net Insider 10 / 2017

LABELLING PET planet Insider Vol. 18 No. 10/17 www.petpla.net 40 Digital direct printing on sample bottles at Döhler Every piece a unique Based on an article by Roland Laumer, Krones AG At Döhler, the future of digital container printing is up and running. The producer of natural ingredients, ingredient systems and integrated solutions for the food and bever- age industries is using a prototype of the DecoType C digital printing system by Krones as a laboratory machine for print- ing on the sample bottles containing Döhler’s newly devel- oped beverage recipes. Döhler. So as to mirror their products’ colourful diversity on the containers’ exterior, Döhler decided to go for direct sample-bottle printing for the first time, and opted for a DecoType C digital printing system from Krones. Around 1,000 sample bottles a day This lab machine has been up and running in the Darmstadt plant since mid-2015. “When a customer orders a product, the staff choose the appropri- ate container types and place them in the DecoType’s infeed carousel, which consists of 21 infeed pockets in total. The DecoType is given the printing order for every single bottle by our materials management system, whereupon printing is started,” explains Christian Bazlen. A central bottle star- wheel accepts every single bottle from the carousel, with a bottle detection unit verifying once again the precise type of container involved. For the printing process, the bottle travels along a total of six printing heads. After that, the ink is cured in a UV compartment for fixation. The central starwheel then again accepts every single bottle and places it in the discharge carousel, from which the operator takes the printed sample con- tainers. The DecoType C lab machine can handle up to 112 bottles an hour. Printing on PET or glass without modifications The printing heads contain the four basic colours of classical 4C printing, comparable to a standard inkjet office printer: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Two additional printing heads supply white and a transparent primer, which serve to enhance adhesion. White can be used for either print- ing pure-white areas, or for combining white areas with 4C printing. The inks in question were developed by Krones, in conjunction with the Marabu com- pany. “This system renders us highly flexible when it comes to bottle design,” explains Christian Bazlen, a media designer and communication specialist by trade. “What’s particularly innova- tive is the fact that we can print on both solid glass material and on soft, flexible PET with just one inking system – and this we can do without having to modify the machine, i.e. without any make- ready times. Moreover, digital printing is, of course, significantly less costly than screen or pad printing.” On the DecoType C, Döhler han- dles commercially available 0.5l PET containers, plus three different shapes of glass bottle: a 0.33l long-neck, a 0.5l NRW and a 0.33l “mini” bottle. “We’re making full use of all the design options available, depending on what the bottle is required to look like later on. Here, we can give free rein to our creativity: possibilities galore, ranging from very generic to extremely specific and goal- driven,” explains Christian Bazlen. Clean printed image for one-off package designs Döhler’s customers, who are getting the printed sample bottles, are delighted with this type of design. The wish expressed by the company’s marketing people to present clients with something The machine’s infeed carousel with a total of 21 infeed pockets The DecoType C lab machine can handle up to 112bph. After print- ing, the Döhler employees fill the bottles with the sample beverages by hand. Fruity as strawberries, sweet as butterscotch, refreshing as lemonade – for Döhler, the taste is everything. At its headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany, the company not only produces natural ingredients for the global food and bev- erage industries but also develops for its customers new recipes and com- plete solutions for the trendy drinks of tomorrow. The innovative formulations are then filled in sample bottles and dispatched to Döhler’s clients. These sample bottles had hitherto been manu- ally given simple labels by the lab staff, which provided merely the technical data involved. “Not really innovative, that, highly technical and rather boring,” comments Christian Bazlen, who works in marketing at Döhler GmbH. “We invariably attempt to create an added value for our customers and partners. We wanted the sample bottles to look more visually appealing, and we also wished to have an option for telling customers a bit more about the product inside. Not to mention that this also enables us to show them what their product might in future look like in a bottle,” adds Christian Bazlen, who is also responsible for corporate design at