NACARA IMPRESSIONS

Cognac is a town in Western France, and it’s not difficult to guess what the area’s main activity is. Nacara Impressions is a label converter just south of the town, and there are no prizes for guessing what their main activity is. In this very traditional wine-growing area, an outsider is anyone whose grandparents were not dyed-in-the-wool Cognaçais. That gives Nacara’s owner Laurent Jeannaud a head start; although he only acquired the business in 2006, his family has been in the wine growing business for generations.

Nacara’s list of customers reads like a roll call of the top names in the spirits business: Hennessy, Remy Martin, Camus, Bacardi, Pernod Ricard and many more. With names like these to care for, Nacara puts quality and finishing above quantity. The company’s 35 employees will bring in sales of around $5 million this year, 80% of it being labels, and the rest, packaging. The need for a wide variety of finishing technologies, including anti-counterfeit features, means that Nacara has a wide range of equipment, not all of which can be used to capacity. For wet-glue labels, Nacara has a Heidelberg Speedmaster. For self-adhesives, conventional printing is on a six-color Codimag Viva. For digitally printed labels the company two years ago invested in an HP Indigo 6600 with offline finishing equipment from AB Graphic. Other offline finishing processes include screen-printing, hotfoil, embossing and shaping.

Coatings and varnishes are particularly important for wines and spirits labels, according to Jeannaud. “Tactile and transparent varnishes are just the start,”  he says, “We also get called to do perfumed finishes, or varnishes with a sequin effect. To say nothing of the sleeve labels we also provide, with or without tamper-evident closures.” All this is for the label side. However for many of its customers Nacara also provides the packaging. “If our customers can’t get their labels and folding boxes from the same supplier, they risk problems, particularly in ensuring color conformity,” says Jeannaud. “It’s partly for this reason that we recently installed a Konica Minolta 1000 series digital press operating reel-to-reel or reel-to-sheet. We use this line for the variable and short-run printing. It’s perhaps an unusual choice but it suits us perfectly in terms of price/quality.”

Nacara’s expertise goes beyond just printing and converting. “We have to make an impact on our customer’s customers,” says Jeannaud. “When our salespeople go to a customer it’s mostly to see the marketing manager. Together with our customers we analyze their needs, provide the graphics and – most important – we check their labeling and packing lines. Too often label converters forget that their job doesn’t finish until the product is labeled, packed and on the retailer’s shelf.”

Wines and spirit labels are the mainstay of Nacara’s business, but it has branched out into other areas, in particular cosmetics labels and labels/packaging for gastronomic food products. For all these sectors, the market structure is changing as mergers and acquisitions increase the concentration. Hennessy for example has a 40% market share of cognac sale worldwide, and the three biggest groups control nearly 70% of the world market. In the luxury foods business, the trend is the same. There are now, for example, just two groups controlling over 80% of world sales of foie gras. For a modest label and packaging producer like Nacara this concentration spells danger. “We are well aware of the situation,” says Jeannaud. “When both your customers and your competitors are big and getting bigger, there’s a very real risk to the small converter’s business. Our main strength is being local to so many of our customers; they know they can call us any time of the day or night. You try doing that with our bigger competitors!”

At present, around one quarter of the company’s business is printed digitally, with ever more short-run orders and customers who need labels in 57 different varieties, (and by tomorrow, please…). The proportion of digital will certainly increase, according to Jeannaud. “Practically any order of less than 3,000 running feet gets printed on the HP Indigo,” he says, “Though we can occasionally go up to 18,000 feet.” However, the new Konica Minolta will open up a whole range of new possibilities. “Innovation is first and formost with us,” he says. “Continuous research and development in cooperation with our suppliers and partners enable us to continually improve our print quality, innovative processes and materials. Our quest for innovation in the areas of traceability, anti-counterfeiting and particularly environmental sustainability is ongoing.” Respect for the environment is taken seriously, and the company carries the coveted “Imprim’vert” certification which covers safe disposal of printers’ waste products, and also monitoring and reducing energy consumption (this certification does not – yet – cover recycling of waste papers and plastics, a surprising omission).

Nacara is in the process of extending its workflow to let its customers track their orders, and it plans to open up a Label & Packaging Research Center to smooth design and artwork cooperation, and to help information flow between the company and its customers worldwide.

Worldwide? Although Nacara’s business is concentrated in the Cognac and adjacent Bordeaux regions of France, it also exports, and one of its prize customers is located on the island of Mauritius, right in the middle of the Indian Ocean.  –John Penhallow