K-1 Packaging Group
www.k1packaging.com


Having eclipsed its 25-year anniversary, K-1 Packaging Group has its sights squarely set on the future. This versatile printer has turned to Landa Digital Printing to position itself for the next 25 years.
K-1 Packaging Group is a family owned and operated business that started as K-1 Printing & Graphics in 1993. During the company’s first four years, it operated small format one-color and two-color duplicator offset presses, producing envelopes, letterheads and business cards.

“Although we also took on commercial printing projects, they were all outsourced because at the time we did not have the in-house capability to produce such work,” recalls Mike Tsai, president of K-1 Packaging Group. “During the dot-com boom of the late 90s, there was much discussion about how the digital revolution would someday eliminate the need for print. Recognizing this as a threat to our livelihood, we made a strategic pivot into the packaging space by offering folding cartons. The initial steps were very tough because we were lacking in both financial means, as well technical knowledge. It took a lot of grit and years of persistence to slowly get established in the packaging space, but of course, our steadfastness paid off.”

Over time, K-1 Packaging Group steadily added more capabilities and product offerings as the company began to better understand the needs of the market. Today, K-1 Packaging Group offers a diverse product portfolio, which includes folding cartons, litho-mounted corrugated boxes, pressure sensitive labels, shrink sleeves, flexible packaging and stand-up pouches. These are produced using sheet-fed offset printing, sheet-fed digital printing and narrow web flexo and digital printing. The company also leans on a host of post-press and finishing capabilities. 

To successfully play in such a wide range of applications, K-1 Packaging Group has accumulated a reliable list of industry partners. Koenig & Bauer, Mark Andy, Nilpeter, HP Indigo, Esko, EFI, Kodak, and Landa Digital Printing have all been instrumental in the company’s success over its nearly 30 years of growth and development.

Today, K-1 Packaging Group has 120 full-time staff members across two facilities in Southern California. The City of Industry facility houses the company’s administrative headquarters and serves as the manufacturing site for folding cartons and litho-mounted corrugated boxes. The Pomona facility features production of pressure sensitive labels, shrink sleeves, flexible packaging, and stand-up pouches. Both facilities, which account for a combined area of 160,000 square feet, operate two shifts, and both are ISO 9001:2015 certified.

By establishing so many successful partnerships, K-1 Packaging Group can offer solutions for virtually any market. “We don’t claim to specialize in serving a specific market. Conversely, the breadth of consumer product markets that we serve is broad and diverse,” explains Tsai. “Examples of industries we provide retail packaging for include cosmetics, personal care, nutraceutical and dietary supplements, pharmaceutical, medical, packaged dry food and refrigerated food, confectionary, home fragrance, consumer electronics, and cannabis and CBD. The varying needs across these diverse industries make good utilization of our capabilities. The fact that we incrementally introduced new capabilities and products over the years is simply a logical evolutionary progression. We want to grow the company by providing products and services that the market needs.”

K-1 Packaging Group recently installed the Landa S10 Nanographic printing press to assist with short-to-medium runs for folding cartons, countertop displays, labels, and litholam corrugated boxes. With the new press, the company anticipates the ability to keep costs down, improve profitability and give considerably greater flexibility to clients.

“The Landa S10 press was chosen specifically to address the ever-increasing number of short-run folding carton jobs that we see,” notes Tsai. “We chose this press for its run speed, B1 format, print quality and productivity. The press installation was completed at the end of July. We’re currently doing trial production runs and systems fine tuning. The amount of support and resources that Landa has poured into this installation has been confidence inspiring.”

Landa showed Tsai and his team what would take eight make-readies on a conventional press but achieved in only an hour and 10 minutes on the Landa S10. This makes the Nanographic printing press three times faster than any digital solution, and six times faster than a digital press closest to the 41″ format, Tsai adds.

Nachum Korman, vice president and general manager for Landa Digital Printing in the Americas, has praised K-1 Packaging Group for being “one of the world’s most progressive companies.” That vision has extended beyond printing. K-1 Packaging Group prides itself on its sustainable initiatives and low carbon footprint. While each stage of the lifecycle creates its own environmental impact, it also represents opportunities for improvement. This is the approach K-1 Packaging Group takes in its design process.

The company aims to achieve a balance between meeting the packaging’s functional requirements and reducing its footprint on the environment. Appropriate selection of materials, efficient usage of the materials chosen, thoughtful consideration of the structure and its physical dimensions, configuration, weight and volume, etc. are all accounted for by its engineers.

K-1 Packaging Group is also a proud participant of the Green-e renewable energy program. “Our purchase of the Green-e renewable wind energy certificates (RECs) guarantees that an equivalent amount of renewable energy is delivered to the electric grid and provides additional revenue to help keep existing wind energy projects operational while also growing the wind energy markets,” says Tsai. “K-1 also maintains chain-of-custody certifications under the FSC and SFI standards for paperboard used in the manufacturing of folding cartons.”

K-1 Packaging Group’s versatility, breadth of products and markets served has enabled the company to withstand the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. Tsai and his team rigorously implemented safety measures such as health screening, a mandate on wearing of facemasks, social distancing, frequent cleaning of contact surfaces in late March of 2020, before such practices were considered routine.

“Because of the effectiveness of our preventive measures, we have been able to maintain a work environment that is safe and reassuring for the staff,” explains Tsai. “This is of great significance considering that packaging manufacturing is considered as part of the country’s essential infrastructure by the Department of Homeland Security. As such, we had a civic duty to maintain operation.

“Looking at our year-to-date, top and bottom line, we can say the COVID-19 pandemic has had minimal effect on the company,” he adds. “We attribute this to the diversity of markets and industries that we serve. While the demand for non-essential products declined sharply during the pandemic, the demand for essential products soared. This counterbalancing leveled out the workload during the initial months of the pandemic when there was much fear and uncertainty.”

According to Tsai, the future is bright at K-1 Packaging Group. What could this entail? “Providing product fulfillment, warehousing, and logistical support is a value-added service that K-1 could potentially provide to customers in the near future,” he says. “K-1 would assemble/package customer-provided end-products with K-1 manufactured packaging materials, making the end-product fully retail ready. We would then warehouse and manage the finished inventory and prepare it for shipment and distribution according to a provided schedule.”