During the Packaging Consortium’s Pac To The Future event in Niagara Falls, Canada on September 28-29, Sun Chemical will show how its packaging capabilities can help brand owners achieve their goals in lightweighting, consumer interactivity, shelf standout, extended shelf life, color consistency, brand protection and more.

Russell Schwartz, Sun Chemical’s chief technology officer, will be a speaker at the event at 11:20 a.m. on Thursday, September 29th, and will talk about key technological advances in material science, including electronic materials and computational power, which will enable a new generation of packaging options for brand owners that best benefit consumer trends and societal influences.

“Having our chief technology officer speak at an important event like this that focuses strongly on the packaging of the future, speaks volumes about Sun Chemical’s commitment to brand owners and the packaging market,” says Rod Staveley, president of Sun Chemical Canada. “Sun Chemical is a key leader in innovation and technology advancement for the packaging industry. We invest millions in research and development to bring quality solutions that will help brand owners achieve their packaging goals. We’re excited to showcase the wide range of offerings we have to help them.”

Sun Chemical’s wide range of coatings will be on display at booth No. 11 during the event, including a variety of options for satin, matte and gloss printing, in addition to its SunInspire sensory coatings line, which offers special effects that allow a customers’ product packaging to stand out on store shelves visually through high luster metallic, fluorescent, glitter, pearlescent, as well as iridescent finishes. SunInspire tactile coatings, ranging from coarse and gritty to soft and smooth, appeal to the sense of touch. Other coatings in the line can create an interactive experience with color shifting, reticulating, and other aromatic coatings.

Designed to enable lightweighting of packaging by removing EVOH polymer layers from packaging, as well as offering improved laminate flexibility, Sun Chemical’s SunBar oxygen barrier coatings provide a smooth, homogenous, pinhole-free layer that can be easily overprinted with inks and laminated to a variety of secondary films. SunBar is cost-effective, recyclable, biodegradable and press-ready, allowing for lighter-weight packaging, a reduced carbon footprint, and easy application with few changes to current equipment.

Sun Chemical’s SunLase laser marking solution is a coating that enables brand owners to add content to both secondary and primary packaging information after the filling and closure of the pack, whether for practical supply chain purposes or as a late stage packaging differentiator. The SunLase solution prints a transparent or tinted coating onto a packaging substrate during the printing process. After the packaging has been sealed, variable coding graphic information, such as barcodes, QR codes, and “Use By” dates or branding, can be created using a low power CO2 or fiber laser to change the color of the patch to black where marked, with no risks to the packaged product.

Visitors of the booth can learn about Sun Chemical’s SunColorBox toolkit, which offers a range of services from consulting, the visualization of a brand’s digital colors with proofs and a digital handbook with color standards, to the creation of a full digital color communication between the ink supply and customer network that ensures brand color consistency everywhere across the world.

Booth visitors will also learn how Sun Chemical can help brand owners explore brand protection options to ensure the integrity of their packaging. Sun Chemical offers a variety of security ink solutions, including an infrared coding solution called Verigard, a security system that adds a small quantity of taggants, or chemical markers, to inks, varnishes or coatings for use in any print process on any substrate. A team of brand protection experts will be on-hand to discuss the variety of covert, overt and semi-overt options Sun Chemical offers, including hidden logos or words and a variety of color changing inks.