Printing what it says on the Tin. Inca Digital and Tinmasters
Richard O’Neill, Tinmasters
Inca Digital is well known as a leader for high quality, high-speed wide-format digital inkjet printing machines for point of sales applications. The Onset has led the way in this sector as the best of class for many years. Now, their strategic attention is focused on a far more challenging and arguably exciting sector, packaging. In this interesting interview, we talk to Matt Brooks of Inca Digital and Richard O’Neill from Tinmasters about the needs for printing technology in metal packaging printing and what is needed from digital to meet the expectations of an almost entirely offset lithographic dominated market.
Richard tell us a little of the background of Tinmasters
Tinmasters have been working with metal for more than a century. In 1880, our original site in Caldicot was home to a Tinplate Works, producing tinplate for the canning industry. During the early 1900s, in the Edwardian age of elegance, the factory focus shifted from the practical to the beautiful – and our history as metal decorators began.
South Wales was the global centre of tinplate production in the 1800s due to the availability of raw materials like coal and tin (from Cornwall) and rapid industrial development with inventions like the steam engine, replacing water mills, and the Bessemer Converter process, which led to steel replacing iron. Metal packaging is in the industrial DNA of our region and we are proud of our heritage.
In our 100 years plus history applying ink onto a metal canvas, we have printed just about every application out there including a few, like film cassettes, that are almost extinct. We have printed all the normal applications such as food cans, tea and coffee tins, confectionery, whiskey tins and lids, paint tins, oil drums, oil filters, gas containers, etc. Infant formula, or baby food, is particularly important, a specialist area for us, requiring the highest compliance and quality standards. We also have some more unusual orders such as for military applications and even phonograph cylinders.
So how did you arrive at the need for digital printing?
We have been aware of the benefits of digital for several years however the high quality of the print achieved in recent print tests moved us from passive curiosity to active interest.
Has anything changed with the crisis?
Most of our business is packaging for food (85%) with 15% going to industrial applications. So, we have continued to produce throughout the crisis to maintain the food supply.
We did see peaks in demand from food producers such as Heinz, Baxters and Tate & Lyle at the start of the lockdown and we have seen reductions in demand for promotional and industrial packaging as the lockdown has continued.
We have had to rapidly adapt working practices to ensure we could operate in a safe way. Thankfully we already had stringent hygiene practices and a business continuity plan which included a specific plan for an influenza pandemic, so we had a head start.
Tinmasters work includes some of the famous names in FMCG
Tinmasters has been around for many years, would you say that you have an Adaptive Culture in order to achieve?
Yes, I think so, it is important for independent printers like us to be innovators and ready to adapt to new technology and ways of working. Tinmasters were the first in the UK with a 4 colour press and more recently we invested in a highly automated state-of-the-art Metalstar 3.
I have personally been interested in inkjet for 5 years and initially, I met and worked with Fujifilm, and then I was introduced to Inca. As I said earlier, the quality of the inkjet print output is now at a commercial level, this makes inkjet, with all its ‘digital’ benefits really interesting.
So how did you meet with Inca?
We met Matt Brooks and Inca through our plans to install an Acuity B1. This press is a great solution for smaller order size. It is very effective for printing orders of less than 500 sheets.
Digital has a difficult act to follow competing with litho, which produces excellent quality and is very cost-effective for larger batch sizes.
Order sizes generally have been coming down as customers what to minimise stock and look to utilise packaging more and more to reinforce their brand. The Metalstar with its automated changeovers can make ready in a third of the time, however, with digital there is no make-ready which makes it a game-changer for the smaller batch sizes.
How is promotional work influencing your interest in digital?
Digital as a process is fast and you can customise and personalise very easily and at low cost. When it comes to promotional packaging it is much quicker and easier to create a prototype or sample using digital inkjet. For a successful campaign being able to see and touch the prototype while it is in your hand is very important!
It also gives designers and marketeers extra flexibility as you can proof online quickly and very effectively. So, you can alter the shading of a label, trying numerous options simultaneously, and see the impact immediately. You simply cannot do this with analogue as it is too expensive and time-consuming to make those changes, so digital gives designers an extra chance to stretch creative boundaries. You can also personalise and customise design cost-effectively. Every print can be different. If you are used to designing only having offset lithographic printing available then this opens lots of new possibilities. We expect marketers and designers to value this and as they learn more this will lead to innovation in our view.
What we have seen is a clear demand for shorter run lengths. You can only get so far with Litho, and the best answer is digital. What up to now has held digital back in the metal packaging sector is reproduction quality, but that has changed.
Richard, how important is Inca for Tinmasters?
For our future, we see Inca as very important. At the moment we have a machine format where digital is effective at 500 sheet run-length - this is our view at the moment. The current technology is great for this particular niche, but we see the potential for a much larger role in the future if inkjet technology develops and this is where Inca come into play.
So, for Tinmasters, establishing a relationship with such a technology leader is very important because working in partnership we will create a solution that is tailored to the needs of metaldec. I think we have a shared vision of what might be possible and the benefits it could bring our customers.
So, Matt how does this work for Inca?
Well we have spent the last 20 years establishing a good proposition for POS and Display and it continues to be a good market, however, it is now mature, and we needed to develop a new path, with one eye on packaging to create our next generation of products. With the development of the Acuity B1, there is an opportunity for us to see the value of a high-quality solution and we will build on this to meet the demand for other applications for short-run to bring something else to the market. This is one of the reasons that working with Tinmasters is so positive for Inca.
Where we can help to develop a partnership is with our print engine and inkjet expertise allied to Tinmasters packaging expertise. By working together, we will deliver a product that is right as we have the best possible relationship to achieve it. In the next 2 years, there are digital solutions we will see that will add value in this space for digital printing.
Acuity B1
So, what kind of feedback (on the Acuity B1) have you received from your customers Richard?
Feedback has been very positive. I think generally customers have been surprised at how good the print quality is. We have been able to turnaround some urgent requests very quickly. We haven’t really had the opportunity to showcase the full quality capability of the press and demonstrate the ‘special effects’ you can achieve with UV inkjet, however, we have some projects in the pipeline which will help with this.
The only downside is that the current technology is likely to be cost-effective for small orders or one-off promotional orders making it niche.
However, it will open the door to new possibilities such as personalisation, for example printing 40 Units and 40 different names is awkward to manage with offset but straight forward for inkjet. Personalisation and the gifting market are growing.
We hope the Acuity B1 is the first step into digital inkjet for Tinmasters that will lead on to further innovation so we are excited to work with Inca, at the cutting edge of development. New generation machines are only years away and not decades.
The Acuity B1 has been around for a year and it has been used for lenticular and sheet metal printing applications and we now have several success stories and it already has a good reputation. It provides us with an answer to shorter run length for a specific niche.
How will you address the problem of digital-only being used for niche applications?
Yes, the challenge is to scale up the technology.
Inca sees an opportunity to develop a next-generation machine that serves several markets, improving the development payback. Tinmasters want the scope to include metal packaging and want to work in collaboration to ensure that the metaldec version is perfectly tuned to the requirements of printing on metal, right-first-time so that we can bring the benefits of digital to more customers.
By working together with us Inca can ascertain the right specification early and we develop the right solution together. We believe this will enable us to better serve our customers which is ultimately critical to success in the longer term. Digital is fundamentally different to offset and knowledge of the technology, business model and printing equipment will, we think, be a critical success factor in the future.
How does this partnership work for you, Matt?
The reason the partnership works is that for us we want to be in a similar position to Tinmasters. Our competitors are also looking, and we want to be part of defining the future for inkjet in new markets but with the right technology solution.
When I talk to people about single pass the common question people say is why are we (Inca) so behind some of the other famous digital names? In response, I like to remind people that we were first with single-pass with Fastjet?! Plus we have our world-leading print engine for the BHS 2.8m RSR!
We are simply taking a slightly different view, by looking at other markets. And picking up on Richards point – with the current turn of events it is more about working together and an inside look on each other to find out how to enhance the product so it works for the market - this is really important - this should be normal, but it is quite novel. We are using it now in a test capacity in September it will be in a plant to move things onto the next stage.
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