How to Fall on Your Feet

When you run out of options and have to sell your lifetime’s business for anything you can get, you can be excused for falling into the Slough of Despond. Many CEOs have despaired, but French entrepreneur Stéphane Rateau, faced with that predicament, seems to have fallen on his feet, and even hit the ground running. His family business, SMAG, made mostly narrow web finishing equipment. 

When it was acquired by the X&llence (pronounced Excellence) Group, Rateau lost pretty much everything. Then what should appear on the horizon but a white knight in the unlikely disguise of Mark Andy. This press manufacturer’s successful growth on the French market had been clouded by the premature death of its local agent. Now, Rateau’s newly created company, Mach Global, was ready and willing to step into the breach. 

Announcing the new appointment, Mark Andy’s EVP Tom Cavalco says, “We are delighted to welcome Mach Global to the Mark Andy family and look forward to working closely with Stéphane to build our profile in France and increase our market share in both the flexo and digital/hybrid sectors.”

AI with ABG

Few L&NW readers will have heard of Route 1 Print. It’s a modest print shop in Northern England, making stickers, flyers, business cards and a whole range of other printed products. Late last year, this company decided to move into continuous label printing. It made a $1.4 million investment into its Stickers & Labels range, adding an HP Indigo 6K digital press and installing an ABG Digicon Lite system. Alongside hardware investments, the company has focused heavily on improving the online ordering experience. A newly developed AI-powered custom shape proofing tool removes the need for cutter files, removing any friction for resellers and their clients, allowing users to simply upload artwork, such as a logo, with the system automatically detecting and generating the cut path.

High Five for Gallus and Cartes

Launched late last year, the Gallus Five is now up and running at its first label converter. This hybrid model, which comes in two widths (340 and 430mm), can run at over 100 m/m (2,000 m2/hour or 22,000 square feet), and was installed at Italy’s Artes Etichette. According to Artes’ CEO Luca Airoldi, the new press is already allowing Artes to shift a lot of its conventional workload to digital production, reducing setup times, lowering material waste, and simplifying production processes.

The Italian press manufacturer Cartes now does most of its business with label converters. Its latest installation is a GT360 line installed at the Staats.Label company in Germany. The line comprises flexo coating, a label-on-label application unit, a spot coating module, a Jet D-Screen digital foil application, a cast-and-cure oven, and a semi-rotary diecutting unit. “It complements our existing production setup, which includes digital, offset, letterpress, screen, and flexo printing, as well as various converting and embellishment technologies,” says joint CEO Rainer Staats.

Europe’s Paper, Packaging and Waste Regulations

Readers of this column will recall the controversy pitting the industry against the European Commission in Brussels. Battles of words have been raging over the Commission’s planned European regulations to unify and regulate the EU’s practice on recycling, known as PPWR. This project has sparked a lot of “Brussels-bashing.” Shouts of “yet more paperwork,” “unwieldy and unnecessary,” and so forth, came from all sectors of the paper and plastics industries. 

All sectors? Well, no. The association Flexible Packaging Europe (FPE) has broken ranks, voicing “strong opposition” to the packaging industry’s attempts to delay or redesign the new regulations, due to come into force in August of this year. The FPE’s reasons are refreshingly simple: if we don’t agree to go ahead with PPWR, each of the 27 countries in the EU will carry on legislating its own variety of ecological controls, and no one will know what they’re doing. Uniformity, says the FPE, is essential to ensure that companies can comply with the EU directive in a practical, enforceable, and fair manner. 

“The flexible packaging sector is ready to deliver on the PPWR’s objectives,” says Karri Koskela, chair of Flexible Packaging Europe. “Over the past years, converters across Europe have made significant investments to redesign packaging in line with recyclability, minimization, and recycled content requirements. It is estimated that the sector has invested more than €1 billion in the past years in research and development to meet PPWR objectives only.”

Going for Gold?

Replacing plastic bottles (nasty and polluting) with paper ones (nice and recyclable) has become a kind of alchemy, often dreamed of but never successfully marketed. Now a German startup called Pulpex reckons it has cracked the problem. Pulpex is developing a patented technology for manufacturing liquid-proof bottles from cast paper fibers. Once used, the paper bottles can apparently be thrown away and recycled with other papers and packaging. They also feature a barrier coating suitable for food applications. The bottles are intended for use with beverages, food, cosmetics, as well as wine and spirits, and so it is claimed, the barrier coating does not interfere with the recycling. The major industrial group Perlen Industrie Holding is currently assessing the industrial implementation of the technology. A decision on the start of production will follow, possibly as soon as 2027.

Dire Straits

Like pretty much everyone else in Europe, the European Printing Ink Association is closely monitoring the disruption to shipping flows through the Strait of Hormuz.  As the conflict in the Middle East continues to escalate, the consequences for energy markets, raw material availability, and logistics for the printing ink sector across Europe are increasingly dire. Europe’s paper mills are getting off lightly – precious little wood pulp comes out of the Persian Gulf. Not so for the plastics business whose feedstocks come out of the refinery just as motor fuels do, and prices are going up and up. The same is true for inks. Two flexo ink suppliers – hubergroup and Sun Chemical – have already announced price increases. Whatever the product, Europe is the worst hit with reduced supplies of crude arriving after being sent round the Cape of Good Hope rather than risk running the gauntlet of Hormuz, followed by potshots from trigger-happy Houthi tribesmen in the Red Sea. Solvents, binders, resins, and additives are all being affected by Brent crude prices rising above $100 per barrel.

Sleever Sells Out

Sleever is, or was until very recently, a 100% French company, founded by Eric Fresnel’s family some 40 years ago to develop what was then the very young market for sleeve labels. It has grown into an internationally recognized brand, employing nearly one thousand and with worldwide sales of $213 million. 

Sleever is headquartered near Paris and has 11 manufacturing facilities in Canada, France, Germany, Belgium, Ireland, Poland, China, and Brazil. It is a highly profitable company (EBITDA margin of 11.1%) and is almost unique in being fully vertically integrated: it buys its raw material direct from the refinery, makes the sleeves and sells both sleeves and applicators directly to the label converter. Eric Fresnel joined the family business in 1980, and in 2025 was looking to retire. This did not escape the attention of Geoff Martin, the heavyweight (in the financial sense) president of CCL. 

This group, founded in Toronto, Canada, is arguably the biggest label enterprise in the world, with 26,000 employees. And yes, it also makes sleeve labels. Although acquiring Sleever is a “friendly” takeover, it must still get through the “required procedures” of French law, plus the even thornier cross examination of the trade unions. 

Optimists, however, expect the transaction to close by mid-2026. According to CCL’s Guenther Birkner, the combined sleeve-related operations of the two companies are expected to represent a platform generating approximately $700 million in sales, based on 2025 figures.

Intelligence, Natural and Artificial

It is almost impossible to find a press release that does not refer to AI. Durst is no exception. This Italian label press manufacturer, first founded in 1938, has launched Kyveris, designed to “unify files, machines, software, data and artificial intelligence within a single production framework.” 

Durst is chary about giving details as Kyveris was only just launched at May’s FESPA exhibition. From the brief press release it seems that it is an AI-glorified optimization program using insights gathered from thousands of production systems installed worldwide, and used to teach your label press how to smarten up and work better. 

Smart Wine Labels

In Italy, as in many other European countries, wine labeling is big business. Britain’s Xaar and Italy’s Polytex International reckon they have the answer for producing complex wine labels better and faster. Through the installation of Xaar’s Versatex printbar, converters get to use digital methods for applying all kinds of decorative features to labels used on complex products. 

More than 20 Versatex printbars have now been installed across Italy, mostly for printing and converting high-value wine labels. Xaar’s Versatex technology, for example, allows converters to apply varnish and cold foil digital embellishments within a single unit using one fluid system.

Best and Worst Places to Stage a Trade Show

Europe’s packaging world has on its calendar two of its big trade shows: interpack, in Dusseldorf, and Fachpack, in Nuremberg. At the time of writing these lines, your correspondent can only rely on the enthusiastic whoops of the shows’ organizers. The packaging industry will scrutinize the results of interpack in particular to know what, if any, is the future of big packaging shows. Both shows are in May: they also clash with the Iran Food & Packaging Show in Tehran, but this may be postponed due to unforeseen circumstances.