Packaging Technologies Praises Heaford for Helping Scoop Multiple Print Awards

With steadily rising sales figures and an increasingly cramped trophy cabinet, Packaging Technologies Inc., a division of The Central Group from Concord, ON, Canada, has tipped 2020 to be one of its best years yet and has cited JM Heaford a key player in its success to date. Heaford, the industry-leading supplier of mounting and proofing solutions for the tag and label, flexible packaging, corrugated and gravure markets, has been a trusted technology partner of Packaging Technologies since the 1990s.

A Heaford MounterProofer delivers consistently accurate mounting, day in day out, for a range of preprint and corrugated packaging jobs for PTI’s Uteco and Kidder presses.

“We were getting return on our investment from day one of installation of the first Heaford Mounter Proofer,” comments Sunil Datt, Print Manager for Packaging Technologies. “We run butt-fit jobs and very tight registration of multiple colors. Seventy per cent of our jobs are process color, so the precision of the Heaford technology paid off right away.”

Currently running an average of 5 million linear feet (1.524 million metres) per month, Packaging Technologies (PTI) specializes in mid-web preprints, from low volume to long runs. The company aims to make the print/production process as seamless and efficient as possible. To do this, it operates a unique complement of production equipment, including corrugators equipped with inline die cutting. “Printing before corrugation will increase your colour consistency and overall registration while decreasing the “fluting affect” common in the post print process,” explains Datt. PTI is able to produce 95 percent of its corrugated boxes under one roof.

Year after year, PTI wins North American Excellence in Flexography awards, EFIA Awards and was also recently distinguished twice in the UK’s 2019 FlexoTech Awards for ‘Best Print – Originally Printed by Another Process’ and ‘Best Print – Sacks & Corrugated Preprint Liner’. JM Heaford was chosen to represent the company in collecting the trophies.

According to Sunil Datt, PTI has become renowned for the sharpest quality flexo print, and Heaford systems have been a vital component in guaranteeing those standards day after day: “All the awards we are winning from North America to Europe speak for themselves. The Heaford equipment is efficient and simple to operate, not to mention robust, and the fact that remounting is practically unheard of in our plant means that we can continually improve. We can keep challenging ourselves – and the flexo process – with more complex packaging print requiring the tightest register on some of the most unsympathetic materials.”

The robustness of the technology supplied by JM Heaford is beyond doubt. Despite running at 80 percent capacity, six days a week, PTI is still operating its original Mounter Proofer and still achieving the precise registration that ensures plate changing at Concord incurs “zero press downtime”.

“We’re immensely proud to deliver that quality to our customers and to know that, hand-on-heart, they have invested in the industry-leading technology that will serve them faithfully for many years to come,” comments JM Heaford Managing Director, Sally-Anne Heaford.