French Printer Installs Second Mark Andy Digital Press

Ballouhey SAS is a family printing company located in Saint Marcellin, in the beautiful Auvergne Rhone-Alpes region of southeast France. Traditionally a sheet-fed offset house with some digital capacity, Ballouhey invested in a Mark Andy Digital One press in 2018 and most recently has added its successor, the Mark Andy Digital Pro to its production portfolio.

Established originally in 1908, Ballouhey Imprimeurs is now in fifth-generation ownership and management, and has built an enviable reputation in the food packaging industry for the quality of its printed labels, paper wraps and folding cartons, all of which are certified as ‘food safe’.

Up to 2000, its print capability had always been sheet-fed letterpress and subsequently offset, and today the company has a modern six-color Manroland press with varnish capability that handles dry labels (wet glue) and folding cartons. The company moved into digital print around 20 years ago and today has the capacity for sheeted work.

But it was in 2018 that it took a closer look at what web-fed digital could offer, as Managing Director, Fabien Ballouhey explained: “The volume of work we were sub-contracting to digital printers was growing fast and we felt the time had come to bring it back in-house. The Mark Andy Digital One appealed to us because it was simple to operate and allowed us to print and finish in one pass.”

Digital One, like the new Digital Pro, needs no clean-room environment and is a servo-driven dry toner-based press designed to offer high-quality print at a low level of investment. Even with its small footprint, it still offers a 330mm web width and can handle a variety of substrates, without the need to use the full web width. It prints CMYK at 1200dpi at speeds up to 19m/min, while its flexo station can add spot color, varnishing, laminating, or cold foil, before die-cutting and slitting. It is also fitted with an air-cooled LED-UV lamp, and requires only a single-phase power supply.