Your correspondent recently visited Bidoit, a medium-sized label converter in Cognac. Bidoit is part of a group that recently changed its name to Inessence, and its industrial director, Sébastien Garaboeuf, gave a frank description of how the group has fared since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in February. “Spirits have been the big disaster for this region of France, and of course that has wiped out a painful part of our business. Cognac is 98% exported, mainly to North America and the Far East, and both those markets are depressed. Wine labels, to our surprise, have held up quite well, but everyone in the business is wondering where to stock this year’s grape harvest scheduled to start in a few weeks. Fortunately for our group, we make a lot of food labels. Thanks to government help in part-paying the wages of employees laid off, we have been able to keep on nearly all our staff.”

The manufacturing plant in Cognac uses a lot of screen printing and recently achieved a “world first” by installing the very first model of a new, compact screen washing/drying unit developed by industry supplier Kocher + Beck.

Your correspondent has spoken recently to several other label converters whose attitude can best be described as “bloody, but unbowed.” It was surprising, therefore, to get the provisional FINAT report on Europe’s label business in the first six months of this year. Europe’s labelstock consumption was eight, repeat eight percent up on the corresponding period of last year. The FINAT report warns against excessive optimism, quoting the panic buying and stockpiling that caused label demand for many consumer goods to spike.

“Up until now, 2020 has been a tale of fame and famine for the industry,” says Chris Ellison, FINAT president. “Certain parts of the industry could hardly cope with the excessive demand pressures, others had to rapidly adjust to a steep drop in demand in their sector.”

Labels for automotive and electronics sectors, according to FINAT, showed the biggest fall. June was a month of optimism in most of Europe as COVID-19 cases declined and everyone looked forward to the holidays. Since then, the feared “second wave” of the virus has struck, hitting particularly England and France. The Euro area as a whole suffered a mind-blowing 40% GDP drop in the second quarter compared with Q2 2019. (For the US, the corresponding fall was “only” 33% – see table on page 42.)

Paper bottles, grassy packaging
There is nothing new in paper-and-plastic containers for liquids. Tetrapack has been doing it for decades. A paper-based wine bottle is something new, and a British company called Frugalpac is behind it. While the cost of this paper bottle is similar to that of a labeled glass bottle, its carbon footprint is 84% lower, according to the manufacturer. Producing it also requires less water than its glass equivalent, and the inner lining uses up to 77% less plastic than its plastic counterpart. This bottle is also lighter than a classic bottle, weighing five times less.

As for recycling, Frugalpac says, “The consumer just has to separate the plastic part of the paper before putting these two elements in separate recycling bins.” Er, yes. The Italian winery Cantina Goccia is Frugal’s first customer. It could be the Italians are more conscientious recyclers. Let’s hope so.

Over the water in France, a new start-up claims to have developed an ecological, economic substitute for expanded polystyrene. Inventor Rémi Laurant says, “Embelium is a plant-based material cultivated in the Southwest of France and intended for the eco-design of products and their packaging. It is composed of fibers of local agricultural origin such as hemp and corncobs, mixed with mycelium, which acts as a natural binder. Embelium is thus 100% vegetable, without additives, and compostable. It decomposes in 12 weeks, providing a healthy and fertile humus.”

We all wish Monsieur Laurant good luck. So far it seems customers are not beating a path to his door.

What’s going on?
Readers with very good memories, or even with moderately good ones, may recall the media fanfare surrounding Heidelberg’s acquisition of Gallus back in June 2014. Heidelberg had already provided sales and service for Gallus in Eastern Europe and other regions, and the two companies’ product ranges fit well together. It seemed like a marriage made in heaven.

Heidelberg’s then CEO Gerold Linzbach said, “The full acquisition of Gallus will further enhance the cooperation of the two companies. Together, we will continue to foster development in the growing market for digital label production.”

Linzback resigned at his own request in August 2016 and was replaced by Rainer Hundsdörfer, and now Heidelberg has sold off most of Gallus to benpac holding, a Swiss group few people in the label business have heard of, for around $130 million.

As the new CEO explained, “At the same time, we (Heidelberg) are retaining our digital expertise in-house and will continue to expand the digitization of conventional presses through our cooperation with benpac on the Gallus Labelfire.”

On reading this, the question on many people’s lips was, “What is Heidelberg up to?” Only two answers seem plausible: either this is part of a long-term strategy, which will become obvious later, or, Heidelberg, strapped by falling sales and the global pandemic, needed the money.

Nobody, yet, is suggesting that Avery Dennison needs the money, but the to-ing and fro-ing over the Avery plant at Soignies, Belgium is causing waves. The Belgian plant, formerly Mactac, makes PS labels and wide-web adhesives for cars and buildings. In 2018-19 Avery created some 250 new jobs there but is now in negotiations with the unions to reduce staff at Soignies by 220, blaming falling sales and the COVID-19 pandemic.

New label ideas for double blind testing
The German-based Schreiner Group is rarely out of the news, and in cooperation with biopharmaceutical giant CSL Behring has launched new label/closure combination for facilitating and fool-proofing the blind testing of new medicines. CSL Behring uses transparent vials with a flip-off cap for the clinical study.

Since “verum” and “placebo” look different, the containers must be fully covered by the label so the study participants cannot see what they are taking or being administered. In addition, the study is international, so product descriptions must be in several languages. Schreiner Medi-Pharm’s researchers developed a special combination of their film cap solution Flexi-Cap, and a booklet label. Two silver foil printed caps are used for “blinding” the vials. One cap encloses the closure and the upper part of the vial. The flip-off cap is not covered so that the vial can be easily opened without affecting the blinding. The second cap covers the lower part of the vial and the bottom. The two caps are fixed in place with a multi-page booklet label that provides comprehensive product descriptions in different languages. The construction is assembled and, according to Schreiner, can be adapted to different vial sizes and shapes.

Floating in a nice hot bath
This may be the wrong season to mention it, but hot alkaline baths are needed to separate polypropylene labels from PET flakes during the recycling process. Use the wrong adhesive and you’re left with a residue, which is detrimental to the re-use of the PET. Fedrigoni’s answer to this problem is its new “Rimove AR842” adhesive, which has just been blessed with certification by Germany’s Institut Cyclos.

Fedrigoni (which acquired Ritrama in February of this year) has also developed approved adhesives for use when labeling glass bottles.

United we stand
Five French label equipment manufacturers, all possibly feeling the rope tightening around their neck, have decided to team up. The “Label French Tech Club” comprises Smag, Codimag, Serame, GIC and MGI. Between them, they cover a good part of narrow web printing and finishing expertise.

Speaking on behalf of the new club, Bruno Vitali, managing director of GIC, comments, “The COVID crisis has highlighted the problems of technological dependency and international sourcing, which is a big issue for European label and flexible packaging manufacturers. Through the club, we want to show them that there is a French technological offer, innovative and with high added value, close to their plants
and reactive.”

If you think this carries just a faint whiff of chauvinism, just remember that the – possibly fictitious – soldier Nicolas Chauvin was a Frenchman. The Label French Tech Club plans to come out (in the purely commercial sense) with an exhibition in Paris in October. From October 6-9 at three sites all close to Paris, there will be demos, with visitors being bused from one site to another. This is for sure a courageous decision: its success will partly depend on how the fight against COVID-19 evolves over the coming weeks.

Looking further ahead, this kind of small-scale show may be the best alternative to virtual displays or large-scale exhibitions. Just look what’s happening to drupa. Pushed back to April 2021 because of the pandemic, Europe’s biggest print show seems to be shedding exhibitors like autumn leaves. The list of print technology manufacturers who will not participate in drupa 2021 is growing. After Bobst, Xerox and Heidelberg, Komori and Manroland have apparently sent in their regrets.

For the moment, Koenig & Bauer seems to be the only major equipment manufacturer to have explicitly confirmed its participation in next year’s show. This raises the question: how many more abstentions will there be? And above all: what sort of a drupa will 2021 bring?