Ultrachem addresses water based flexo inks demand for Excel Labels

Packaging Solutions

Ultrachem has won a sole supply agreement with key label manufacturer Excel Labels based in Redditch, Worcestershire. It is now supplying all the company’s water based flexo inks in an alliance that forms part of Excel’s on-going strategy to enhance its production throughput capabilities.

Excel Labels converts a huge variety of paper and synthetic labels and tags for companies in both retail and industrial sectors. The high volume production facility operates with an ethos geared to rapid turnarounds. Working to meet the ever demanding needs of its customers required the company to find inks that would perform within this fast paced production environment.

Jon Roberts, operations manager, explained one of the reasons the company likes dealing with Ultrachem is because of its knowledge regarding ink formulation as well as its on-going desire to clearly understand Excel’s business requirements.

He said, ‘A big positive for us when using Ultrachem’s water based flexo ink is that it is a very stable product which, whilst fast drying, doesn’t dry on the plate. We can now run our presses at higher production speeds than we achieved prior to using these inks.’

In addition, as a high proportion of Excel Label’s volume is with direct thermal papers, it found the carefully formulated water based flexo inks performed extremely well when printing on to both coated and uncoated thermal substrates.

The company was impressed with both the ease of printability of the inks and in particular their ability to ‘sit’ on thermal substrates visibly reducing previous mottling issues. Ultrachem’s water based flexo ink is being used across Excel’s entire machinery portfolio that numbers seven 10” to 13” presses running alongside its digital and high capacity plain label converting lines.

The WB Flexo range includes Colorflex – Flexible Packaging, Colorwell – corrugated post and preprint, Colorbag – paper bags and sacks and Colortissue – tissue. These products all carry ISEGA approved certification for food contact use.