Petone’s Gravure Packaging Ltd has shown that New Zealand packaging standards can lead the way over offshore competition by winning back work that had gone overseas.
Gravure Packaging's entry of the Rush - Ultimate Chocolate wrapping, which won this year's Pride In Print Gravure Category Award, was printed for Parmalat Australia Ltd and senior judge Frank Brokken said that this was an example of a job in which foreign companies could not consistently match the standard of what was produced here.
"The job, as it was produced in Thailand, delivered inconsistent colour and quality results to the customer. Bringing this job back to New Zealand resolved many of the customer's concerns. That is encouraging for local industry and supports capital investment that some local manufacturers have undertaken in resent years.
"There is always a high level of difficulty in printing metallic colours let alone printing on a shrink material that is subsequently 'shrink wrapped' around a product. In this case the job was reverse printed, light on dark colours. It was critical that each colour was dried precisely to minimise ink pick-off and a solid white ink has been printed over the metallic colours without the oticable high solvent retentions present, as these can lead to job rejection."
Mr Brokken said the colours had been maintained in register on a delicate shrink material adding even more complexity to a job that has been superbly printed.
"From an operator's perspective, the solvent balance, ink lay down and consistent drying between colours, tight register control on a sensitive and difficult printing substrate, added to this outstanding job. The operator's skill to achieve this result has been extremely high and is a credit to them and their employer," he said.
The Rush wrapper was printed on Klockner PVC supplied by Nutura NZ on a Pelican Solomark press with inks supplied by Coates New Zealand.
