An excerpt from AP July 2020 – by Milford Astor Foilmakers (A division of Aldus) general manager Damien Prunty
There are three groups of consumables that Aldus distributes the moment: foil (for graphics purposes like hot foil, cold foil and pigment foils used in industrial applications), inks (we distribute Paragon inks) and thermal transfer ribbon (TTR) for printing variable information like barcodes and address labels.
In the foils space, we manufacture our own hot foils in Australia – Foilmakers is the only Australian manufacturer of foil, making us a unique supplier to the Australian market. When we look at foils and inks as a group, the predominant market demand for those products are from packaging and commercial printers. As for the TTR products, the demand comes from a wide range of consumers.
The trends within foils and packaging are more relevant to the print and packaging industries, and the trends differ in Australia as compared to New Zealand within this sphere itself. We have seen a trend over time in the foil area to move from hot to cold foil as cold foil technologies have become better in Australia. There are some inherent advantages for the printer to use cold foil for reduced tooling costs and in most cases, higher running speeds. But there are also limitations with cold foil application on particular substrates, or to be able to do difficult fine work. So, it’s horses for courses, but we have seen growth in Australia for cold foil. If you compare this to New Zealand, the market has been dominated by converters using cold foil.
Labels and cartons are the main recipients of foiling technology and foil is an embellishment so it’s an additional cost to what is considered to be normal printing. It’s predominantly used where there’s either a requirement for some sort of premium packaging – it offers differentiation from other products. Foil is also seen as a premium product to enhance a brand or can be used as a security feature to help with brand protection..
As for inks, they are also increasingly being used to differentiate brands from their competition. So, we’re seeing many brands spending a little bit more money on their packaging in order to help them grow presence on the supermarket shelf. Special coloured inks are increasingly becoming popular, as are metallic inks, inks with special effects, and textured inks and textured varnishes. Lots of our customers are coming to us for their packaging needs, looking for options that they haven’t used before to give them a point of difference.
One of the things that we work with our customers on, particularly with foil and inks, is about making sure that the products that we’re adding to embellish their packaging doesn’t detract from their operational productivity output. Some of it is about justifying the cost and keeping the cost down, and we use technology to do that.
Historically, printers that used to steer away from embellishment because it was at high cost and at the premium end are now able to delve into that market and add some of those embellishments and enhancements to brands that perhaps weren’t seeing as premium brands previously. So, the gap between what was seen as the expensive and the cheapest has started to close.
Moving into the future, Aldus will be focusing our efforts on the packaging space as we’ve noticed that the square metre growth in this space has grown tremendously. We know that commercial printing is going through a difficult time, so where we see areas of growth, when it comes to consumables like foils and inks, is within the packaging space.
Another trend which has been escalating, and will escalate more over the next few years, is around the sustainability of consumables – that’s what packaging is really going to come under close scrutiny around.
Some of the things that we do with foil is we’re looking at changing our technologies to use less solvent through the process as solvent is one of the key ingredients to manufacture foil. The less solvent that we can put through the process, the less solvent needs to be recycled or put to waste. We’re also looking into technologies that are making it easier for foil to be removed from the foil liner and placed on to the label or carton.
Within the inks space, all of the ink providers including Paragon have an ink range ready to go for LED. We just need someone to go buy a press and start using it. LED uses far less energy to cure than traditional mercury lamps, so from an energy and sustainability footprint perspective, there’s less energy required to cure LED inks. And second to that, it means that we’re not putting mercury lamps out into landfill or incorrectly recycling them. Paragon is also looking at introducing a combustible range of inks to the Australian market.
So, sustainability is something that we’re aware of and committed to; it’s a concern that our customers talk to us about daily about.
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