Gamse Labels & Packaging
www.gamse.com


“We make labels… Really cool labels… You’ll find our people are pretty cool, too.” That’s how Gamse Labels & Packaging describes itself on its website, and it’s a claim backed by nearly 125 years of experience providing labels, sleeves and lids for customers in the food, beverage, cosmetics, pharmaceutical, and other end use markets.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s beer or window cleaner – we make just about every type of label, and we’re currently turning out approximately 20 million labels every day,” says Jimmy Canzoniero, president and CEO of the Rosedale, MD company and its vast portfolio featuring pressure sensitive, cut-and-stack, roll-fed, shrink sleeve, and lidding labels. “We’re a boutique service with a product line as broad as the big guys. Everything we make is custom, and we work with our customers to figure out the materials and engineering that will bring what they envision to life.”

The Gamse team has found that, when creating labels that truly shine, less can be more – a lot more.

“We’ve developed a unique expertise in metalized papers and other metallic effects,” Canzoniero explains. “Gamse started as a lithographic cut-and-stack printer doing liquor labels with fancy embellishments, like embossing and foil, which involved a separate and expensive additive process of hot stamping something shiny on the label. Then we started using metalized paper and simply printing white ink on the areas that should not appear shiny. We were one of the first to use metalized paper in significant volumes, and that’s been a big part of our business for a long time.”

Gamse has also developed a similar approach for shrink sleeves, particularly for smaller craft brewers.

“Most shrink sleeves used on cans are printed with a flood of white,” Canzoniero notes. “We take the white away and treat the can surface just like it was metalized paper. By either leaving areas unprinted or using transparent colored ink, we create effects that look like classic brass or super-brilliant shiny gold, or whatever the customer wants. It’s all done just by making use of the underlying aluminum can.”

In its roughly 100,000 square-foot facility, Gamse offers a full line of lithographic, flexographic and digital printing technologies.

“We have a large amount of equipment per square foot compared to most printing companies,” Canzoniero says. “We have four flexo presses and two roll-to-roll digital presses, in addition to the Heidelbergs in our sheetfed department. Roll labels have been where the growth is happening, but we’ve seen a resurgence in sheetfed over the past year. Six of our top 10 customers buy more than one print process from us, and that versatility is a big selling point.”

It’s a challenging environment that requires dynamic, thoughtful investment in the technology and products that will deliver what customers need. Gamse’s newest addition, which arrived last year, is the Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 106, a 41" sheet-fed press that can deliver 18,000 sheets an hour with a roll-to-sheet feeder, automatic closed-loop color control, and UV LED curing.

“It’s like watching a player piano play itself for the first time – just amazing,” Canzoniero says with a laugh. “We were printing 10,000 to 12,000 sheets an hour, and now we’re doing more than the two old presses this one replaced. It also leaves our press staff free to focus on things besides making sure the color is right, so we can more easily ensure top quality.”

Gamse bought its first digital press in 2012, and now has both a small HP Indigo 6900 and a large HP Indigo 20000.

“We were the first company in our region to buy a 20000,” Canzoniero recalls. “Digital is something you have to have now, and it has given us tremendous flexibility. Using magnetic dies is much cheaper, and we don’t have to worry about cylinder sizes. We can complete jobs much more quickly. Customers who make a lot of changes don’t have to waste money on paying for new flexo plates. For us, having digital means we can be platform-agnostic and design programs to help our customers optimize their full program across print processes. If a beer customer has two or three high-volume SKUs, those might run on flexo, but its 20 seasonal varieties might run digital. A key element is our color management process and ability to match color across print processes.”

Digital has also been a game-changer for Gamse beyond the actual printing process.

The company’s newest service, currently being rolled out, is a digital storefront that lets customers see – and order – stock from Gamse’s inventory.

“Several of our customers have more than 1,000 items on their production schedules,” Canzoniero explains. “And when they run into a supply disruption and don’t have the ingredients to make one product with labels they had already ordered, they can look in our system to determine available quantities and choose to have a different label shipped out. This has been particularly useful this year due to supply challenges our customers have had during the COVID crisis.”

Many customers also appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with FELIX, Gamse’s remote annotation and approval site designed to help facilitate review and approval of artwork and speed up the process of getting labels ready for production.

“It’s helpful for customers who have a lot of items, or who have a lot of people involved in the approval process,” Canzoniero says. “They don’t have to worry about physically moving hard copies around the office or to multiple offices. They don’t have to deal with large files getting bounced from email systems. They can see the actual colors, regardless of their monitor calibration, and even turn off each individual color for closer inspection. They can literally draw comments on it. It’s one more way we ensure we’re easy to do business with.”

Digital has also helped Gamse connect with customers beyond specific projects. Technical sales representative Alan Roe spent nearly 40 years in prepress before reinventing himself as “Al, the Label Guy,” with a vibrant video blog that takes viewers behind the scenes for an expert perspective on the entire label process, from the practical aspects of creating a label to the satisfaction of seeing the finished products in the grocery store.

Similarly, Gamse’s “Let’s Talk Labels” blog offers a diverse and growing content library, covering everything from the basics (“What is a Label?”) to achievements (“Gamse Wins Best of Category at 2019 Premier Print Awards”) to employee news (“A Short-Term, Temporary Gig? George Bacharach Retires After 38 Years at Gamse”) to industry insights, most recently on the topic on everyone’s mind in 2020, COVID-19 (“What Will Grocery Shopping Look Like After the Pandemic?”).

“COVID-19 has been an adventure,” Canzoniero says. “Like everyone, we’ve been challenged to implement protocols on the fly, and our office team is working both onsite and remotely to deal with family and childcare issues. But we’ve been open 24 hours a day this whole time, and we’re proud that we’re keeping our people safe and still servicing our customers so there’s food on the shelves when people go to the grocery store. We were also honored to donate our services to print the labels for Goya’s food bank donation of one million cans of chickpeas to help families affected by the pandemic.”

That kind of innate and innovative social responsibility is ingrained throughout Gamse’s approach.

“As we continue to take advantage of advances in diecutting and tooling, we’re able to go thinner on the liners of our pressure sensitive adhesive labels, but still have enough tear resistance so that customers’ new, higher-tension machines don’t rip the film during high-speed runs,” Canzoniero says. “That’s important because film costs more than paper, and we’re excited to be getting close to cost parity by down-gauging film liners. Not only does it save customers money, but it also allows them to end up with a roll of thin PET recyclable materials on their takeup reel, and that gets thrown in their recycling bin, so it’s also good for the environment. We are moving aggressively to migrate from PETG shrink material to more recycler-friendly PET.”

Gamse uses eco-friendly materials, such as soy and high-content vegetable inks, whenever possible. The plant’s energy consumption has dropped more than 20% in the past three years, thanks to more efficient new presses and LED curing, LED lighting throughout the site, and a specialized, bright white rubberized roof that reflects the sun and reduces the need for air conditioning. Next year will bring solar panels to parts of the roof. Recycling is also a big focus that requires internal expertise on evolving waste management protocols to ensure that the plant can effectively recycle the highest percentage of waste.

“I see not recycling the same as throwing a wrapper out the window of a car – I wouldn’t do that,” Canzoniero says. “Especially because our product is consumable, not durable, we strive even more to be part of the reduce-reuse-recycle concept. That also includes limiting the amount of disposable items we use in our plant – down to granular things like recycling our pallets. You have to keep doing a bunch of little things, and they do add up to being something meaningful.”

That drive to be meaningful has been a hallmark of the company from the start. It’s part of the history that began in 1896 when cousins Herman and Benno Gamse founded the company and printed the first label. It’s also part of the future that Jimmy has seen since 1983 when his father Dan took over as president, and that he’s now trailblazing under his own leadership.

“My dad was never the kind of guy who left work at work – ever – so from the time I was little, I knew a lot about Gamse,” Jimmy recalls. “I worked here during summers as a teenager sweeping floors and doing prepress and finishing, then joined the company in 2008 because I was excited about the opportunity to help make meaningful changes. My dad was 65 when he passed suddenly of a heart attack right after Thanksgiving in 2018, and although we had been going down the road to a transition, we had to skip the last half and do it all in a day. Through it all, Gamse has remained a true family business. A lot of families work here, and at least a couple of our employees have been here for more than 40 years. Many live close by. As a result of having that cohesive workforce, we feel responsible for each other, and we are all personally invested in Gamse’s success and that of our customers.”