Labelad undergoes regular printing audits from its consumer-product clients like St. Ives, Kraft, Jergens and Alberto-Culver. Critical shelf packaging forces such clients to collect year-end numbers of printing-quality rejections and cautions from silk screens or pressure-sensitive labels. The president of Jamieson Laboratories, the Canadian vitamin giant, walks down product isles ensuring all of his bottle labels have the same shade of green. Labelad excels in this space as a printing company, pushed into top quality by its parent company, Marnlen Management Ltd.

Shortly after starting Labelad in 1977, Marnlen created its own product consumer company, Sandylion, which is now the world's largest designer and manufacturer of stickers with retail space in over 100,000 locations in 60 countries. Sandylion is Labelad’s largest printing client, housed in the same Markham facility, along with the new Marnlen RFID venture. 

“For Labelad to satisfy Sandylion’s needs, they kept pushing technology providers to come up with bigger and better things,” says Bob Hicks, vice president of Labelad. “Today, the Esko PerfectHighlights work is just another example of that.” 

A new screening application, PerfectHighlights is the reincarnation of a technology that Esko first tried to bring to market as SambaFlex hybrid screening. The packaging vendor went back to the drawing board to rebuild the highlight-dot process as PerfectHighlights, which creates customized screen sets to be combined with other mid-tone and shadow screening technologies – for specific jobs on specific substrates on specific presses. It improves the printing of one to two percent highlight dots and is now being beta-tested by Labelad and a Belgium-based printer.

Labelad has always pushed technological innovation in North America, whether aiming at die makers to create intricate ponies, dogs and butterflies or pushing press manufacturers like Mark Andy to move from 4-colour presses to 8-, 10-, and 12-colour machines. By 2002, Labelad decided to collapse back from its special-colour process in favour of 6-colour Hexachrome. Working closely with Patone and Sun Chemical, it became the first label printer to be authorized as a Hexachrome user. 

“Flexo is constantly being challenged by buyers who want offset quality, but we feel flexo is a great technology,” says Hicks. While offset has been around for a while in the label market, the larger press manufacturers a couple of years ago began adding four offset heads as inline modules on a flexo press. “I think that people who do not necessarily have the skill set in the prepress area are probably more likely to go look at offset.”

Leveraging its colour correction expertise, Labelad is instead turning toward Esko’s PerfectHighlights.

“Part of the push now is vignettes fading off,” says Ken Norris, graphics manager for Labelad. The flexo challenge of producing vignettes is that the human eye can see where the conventional dot ends and the stochastic dot starts, particularly when printing on white or clear label stocks. Norris explains, “As part of the PerfectHighlights dot, what you are really doing is scattering out the one to two percent dot so there is more space between the dots.” The printing is smoothed out and the rigid lines are lost – “but part of that too is a digital dot.”

Labelad employs a fully digital workflow (including Kodak Approval for proofing), which becomes very tricky when buyers are pushing toward a three percent minimum dot quality. “On an analogue plate you have a lot of dot gain because the shoulders [of the dot] are wider,” says Norris. These shoulders of an analogue dot – even at one, two or three percent – provide stability under pressure, while a relatively shoulder-less digital dot starts to flop and cause ink drift. PerfectHighlights allows Labeled to create its own digital dots and to also provide support for them. “We are able to go in there and actually put in little dots, sub-dots.”

Hicks explains that a big part of what makes Labelad a successful flexo printer is realizing they can not do a lot by the time work arrives on press, like dialing down the cyan. The company uses colour correction to engineer the job upfront to fit the plate, the anilox roller and ink formulation. This means filling file spaces by cloning dots or changing spaces by pulling dots out – masking. PerfectHighlights fits well into their demanding prepress work. 

“This will help with [client product line] launches. St-Ives recently launched over 60 SKUs in a six-week window,” says Hicks.

Labelad’s close relationship with its clients has led to Marnlen RFID, as a Mark Andy press is dropping RFID-enabled tags in between two substrates and die cutting it. “We have been commercially supplying since the beginning of the year.  We are the leading company in Canada in that area,” says Hicks. “We can do a lot of testing around the type of antenna structure a client needs and where they need to place it on their product.” Labelad, on account of its silk-screen capabilities, also has the opportunity to actually create RFID inks, because this anilox roll-based process allows conductive ink layers to be laid down in perfect measure before the antennas are attached – something that offset cannot do.