Digital Innovation
While companies such as Vigo and WeCan Solutions are enabling breweries to make their forays canned beer through permanent and mobile canning lines, another manufacturer, Tonejet, offers a printing technology that will enables breweries to open up new avenues for their beer can packaging.
Tonejet’s 2-Piece Can & Tube Digital Decorator is designed to meet the needs of short to medium print runs for a range of applications, and beer cans are a key application in this space.
Traditional analogue printing process that have been used for decorating cans, coupled with the economic crossover point of the suppliers, has meant that minimum order quantities of around 100,000 units, as well as testing lead times, have effectively resulted into monumental barriers to entry for smaller breweries requiring printed cans.
The company’s electro-static drop-on-demand digital print system is designed to enable canners and craft brewers to produce short to medium run can jobs with the USPs of high speed production coupled with high quality print, and at a low cost.
Digital can printing’s benefits are not restricted to short to medium run economics, rather this is a fact of the technology. What is also attractive is the ability to change the design of the can at ease.
The domestic use of full colour digital inkjet printer in homes or offices enables the user to print a different document or image on each individual sheet. Leveraging the Tonejet technology, the same idea can be applied to cans, which can be ordered small to medium can runs, where the design for each can could be different or even personalised to an individual.
Tonejet’s Digital Decorator allows for different images to be printed one after the other without the need to stop the production line, change printing plates, or change printing inks while the high resolution digital imaging process means that high quality photo images can be printed as well as traditional graphics.
The benefit of cans providing an opportunity for brewers to use the full container height and the full 360 degree circumference is well known. It’s significantly larger than a label can provide cost effectively, which arguably allows brewers in the UK and Ireland to increase their branding coverage.
Return on Investment
Simon Edwards, VP of sales and marketing at Tonejet says that digital can printing technology is enabling the availability of many more good beers with striking marketing, and branded products to be brought to market, with the potential to unlock yet more growth from beer.
He explains: “We have spoke to a lot of people, currently there are companies bottling that want cans. The feedback from the bottlers and brewers is showing us that there is an interest in cans full-stop.
“There is a great deal of brewers that don’t like the look of labels, and what stifles some of these companies is the inability to print digitally, but the problem is that these machines don’t come cheap.”
According to Edwards, while the return on investment is rapid, the average brewery doesn’t have the ability to support a single machine, which is opening up an opportunity with contract canners. He highlights one such business in the US, BevCan, that created a business based on its technology and has been successful with it.
“With canning, the problem is that people want to can small volumes and if you want these printed then you will need to be putting in large order sizes to the major manufacturers.
With Tonejet technology, the cost is the same if you are printing 10 cans or 40,000 cans. But at the same time, the ability to print major runs is there, too,” he explains.
Edwards concludes: “There’s also an opportunity here for major breweries to adopt the technology. If you are running the machine eight hours a day, you will be producing around seven million cans a year.”
