Skratch Labs, the maker of clean and simple sports nutrition products for endurance athletes, is breaking away from its traditional packaging with a special edition design to show support for the EF Education First Pro Cycling team competing in the Tour de France. A limited-edition lemon and lime Sports Hydration Mix salutes the team jersey, each in a customized design generated with HP Mosaic print technology.

ePac Flexible Packaging, the all-digital flexible packaging print provider, printed the resealable pouches using the HP Indigo 20000 digital press and HP SmartStream Mosaic automated variable design software.

“ePac has been a great packaging partner for the past two years. They came to us with an opportunity to do a short-run packaging design using an HP technology that gives each package its own unique twist on our design. We jumped at the chance to highlight one of our key partners – EF Pro Cycling Team – and their breakthrough jersey design for a limited-edition packaging run,” says Elliot Freeman, vice president of marketing at Skratch Labs. “The whole thing came together from idea to reality in three months, just in time for the Tour de France. Cycling fans are going crazy for it.” 

Founded in 2016, ePac is enabling its customer base of SMBs and brands to benefit from economical short and medium run length jobs, with rapid time to market and high-definition graphics. ePac produced its first HP Mosaic project for the Skratch Labs EF Pro Cycling limited edition package, printing and finishing 10,000 unique pouches at its Boulder, CO, USA site, one of six now operating in the US. ePac is expanding internationally with sites in the UK and Vancouver, Canada opening later this year.

HP SmartStream Mosaic is an algorithm that automatically generates a high number of unique graphic patterns from a seed design by randomly transforming a master artwork file, rotating, transposing, interchanging colors and amplifying the design anywhere.

“HP SmartStream Mosaic is an extremely powerful tool. This project is a fantastic demonstration of how sporting team sponsors can use their logos and designs to develop unique items for fans to get into the team spirit and save as collectors’ items,” says Carl Joachim, CMO of ePac Flexible Packaging.

For the EF Pro Cycling special edition package, Skratch Labs and ePac worked together to implement a design theme that would represent Team EF Pro Cycling’s racing jerseys. The idea was to use the jersey design and color patterns to create a package that would commemorate the team, who is a top contender at this year’s Tour de France.  “With HP Mosaic software and our ability to create special metalized effects without metalized inks, we created 10,000 amazing and unique packages,” adds Dustin Steerman, managing partner of ePac Boulder.

The 30″ (76 cm) HP Indigo 20000 can print virtually any sized flexible packaging application with unlimited variation and support demand for growing SKUs, alongside benefits of reduced waste from minimal setup and production of only the quantities needed. The solution provides converters the freedom to produce nearly any flexible packaging application, in addition to labels and shrink sleeves, on film or paper – all with the proven quality to help meet strict brand requirements.