Lorytex, a 2019 Gold Award winner at the Miraclon-sponsored Global Flexo Innovation Awards, has been honored again as the first-ever Platinum Award winner. In 2019, Lorytex met three of the criteria against which Awards are judged: creative use of graphic design, production workflow efficiency and commitment to sustainable print. For 2021, the company went one better and added the fourth – process conversion – for successfully converting over 500 jobs to ECG in the last 18 months.

For Lorytex, extended color gamut (ECG) has transformed the business. The company has almost five years’ with ECG largely thanks to Kodak Flexcel NX Technology from Miraclon. Explains Roberto Dolinsky, managing director of the flexo prepress tradeshop, “We started on the ECG path in 2016, when we changed to Flexcel NX Technology because we believed its stability and process control were the best route to good results with ECG. It was also around the time that Miraclon released Advanced DIGICAP NX Patterning Technology, which gave even more stability and print control.

“When a brand or a converter is considering ECG, they’ll almost always come to us first,” adds Dolinsky. 

Lorytex’s winning entry – multiple SKUs of cereal doypacks – demonstrates the considerable benefits of converting flexible packaging from gravure to flexo, and in this case to ECG instead of traditional flexo.

Brand owner Saint Hnos del Uruguay previously had its project printed gravure in China but wanted to explore “reshoring” production to a local supply chain. Several reasons were behind the decision. Supply chain issues raised by the Covid-19 pandemic were a powerful argument for the shorter delivery times possible with local production, along with lower transport costs and a sustainability premium. Flexo ECG enabled multiple product varieties to be ganged together, delivering faster turnaround of shorter runs of more product varieties, allowing Saint to respond faster to changing consumer demands. Finally, energy, ink and solvent consumption costs would all be considerably reduced.

Saint worked with Strong Converter SA, part of Grupo Maccio. Strong has worked with Lorytex for almost 10 years, most recently on exploring the application of ECG, which became more serious after Lorytex’s 2019 Global Flexo Innovation Awards win. Explains print manager Gustavo Bisogno, “We’d been aware of ECG for some time, but when Lorytex won the award we thought, ‘This must be a really innovative technology.’ So, when Saint explained what they wanted to achieve through local production, it was logical to bring Lorytex into the team.”