Dutch hot sauce maker Dokter Worst is marketing a festival edition of its “Nondedju Hete Saus” brand with bottle designs developed with HP SmartStream Collage. Vila Etiketten, a Dutch label printer, produced the special edition for the Heet Zuur Hop food festival in the Netherlands.

An Optimum Group company, Vila Etiketten is a fully digital labels and packaging converter operating five HP Indigo digital presses. Vila Etiketten was approached by Dokter Worst to see what possibilities were available for a limited edition hot sauce dedicated to the festival.

Since the artwork for the festival had already been designed, Vila offered to create one-of-a-kind labels with HP SmartStream Collage design software. Each label features graphical elements that differ from bottle to bottle. Vila pulled out the key design elements from the artwork, including hot peppers, limes, hops, and pineapples, representing the ingredients of the hot sauce, then activated HP Collage in a playful way.

HP SmartStream Collage uses algorithms to create random combinations of specified design elements, thereby creating customized artwork for packaging, commercial and specialty printing. The variable design creates movement in the appearance of the bottles across the shelves. The labels were printed on an HP Indigo 8000 digital press and the boxes for the set of three bottles were printed on the HP Indigo 30000 digital press.

Jeroen de Bont, owner of Dokter Worst and Nondedju Hete Saus, says, “Without losing the identity of both my sauce and the festival, Vila helped us create unique labels that triggers the attention and compliment the bottles of hot sauce.”


HP SmartStream Collage came to market after HP SmartStream Mosaic, with new capabilities for HP SmartStream Designer, a plug-in for Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator.

Hugo de Graaf, head of prepress digital at Vila Etiketten, adds, “With SmartStream Collage, HP offers us yet another opportunity to give our customers a great marketing tool. From our smallest customers to the biggest brands, we now can supply them with unique labels going from massive designs to a subtle change while staying true to the identity of the product. Since we are already specialists in variable data printing this is a huge benefit and an extra value-add towards our customers.”