BRUSSELS, Belgium—Labelexpo Europe 2017 celebrated its biggest-ever edition at the Brussels Expo, occupying nine exhibition halls—12 percent bigger than 2015—and attracting 37,742 visitors (up 5.6 percent). Apex International worked to tap into all major trends that headlined the show, welcoming the audience to its Knowledge Center in Hall 11—close to Labelexpo’s Automation Arena.
As labels remained central to the overall Labelexpo experience last September, the show’s organizers emphasized that the show floor also reflected its continued diversification into flexible package printing. And while inkjet technology made a real breakthrough at this year’s show, there was also the latest hybrid press offerings from major conventional press suppliers as well as a wealth of new conventional flexo press developments with enhanced features for automation, package printing and increased efficiency for short runs.
For Apex International, Labelexpo Europe allowed the company to showcase its goal of addressing major trends in the industry:
Smart Anilox: The introduction of an RFID-equipped anilox roll is meant to enable Apex customers to reach new levels in automation and process control. Remco Snik, manager R&D at Apex International, explains: “This ‘Smart Anilox’ is able to automatically share status information with intelligent systems. The Smart Anilox data will be integrated into the MIS. This will simplify scheduling jobs on various presses and shorten makeready times. And the system will be able to provide feedback that enables preventive anilox maintenance to take place in time.
“By teaming up with press manufacturer MPS—already one of our technology partners for over 20 years—and its groundbreaking ‘talk to me’ connectivity technology, Apex is once again expanding its offer to printers to become more efficient and more productive.”
UV Inks: Labelexpo set the stage for a new industry initiative, FoodSafeUV, to promote the safety of UV inks and varnishes for indirect food contact packaging. According to the group, “UV opens up new opportunities for short run flexible packaging with the added benefits of in-line UV decoration technology and a more environmentally sustainable profile.”
Next to the opportunities and advantages, however, UV inks are known to cause problems such as ink spitting, due to their high viscosity. By reinventing the very concept of anilox ink-to-plate transfer with its patented GTT Open Slalom Ink Channel anilox geometry, Apex is working to provide a unique solution to prevent this problem from occurring.
Bellissima: To improve both quality and efficiency in flexo printing, Apex has always been a strong promoter and enabler of fixed palette printing. Also, Apex is a dedicated member of the REVO-project, supporting the aim to “digitally” standardize and automate the flexo process from prepress to print delivery, as was demonstrated at the Bobst booth during Labelexpo.
Stepping up its efforts in this field even further, Apex used Labelexpo to announce the formation of Aniken Graphics International, a joint venture with UK-based prepress expert Hamillroad Software to bring Bellissima Digitally Modulated Screening into the flexographic mainstream. Nick Harvey, the newly appointed managing director of Aniken, explains the importance of this partnership: “Bellissima was developed and fine-tuned using GTT aniloxes, so not only can our customers consistently see print quality results that exceed gravure and offset, but they can do so for a fraction of the cost allowing flexographers to gain significant competitive advantages especially with shorter runs.”
As a result of the partnership, Apex International has been granted distribution rights to Bellissima worldwide.