System Print, Germany

System Print was founded in 1991 by the Hitpaß family and has grown considerably due to its quick and flexible response to the market’s demands and its second to none industry knowledge.

Today, System Print employs around 35 staff and works across various industries, including transport, cosmetics, shipping, and food.

Working across multiple markets, System Print provides a tailor-made label solution to meet its customer’s needs. “The development of these relationships requires continuous investment in the latest production innovations, alongside a strong focus on quality assurance at every stage of the production process,” explains Phillip Hitpaß, Manager at System Print.

Historically, System Print worked with CMYK and multiple spot colors on their flexo printed labels; this was an area they looked to optimize.

“We were looking for a solution which would help improve the quality of our printing, while also addressing the market challenges facing us; this included the increasing requests for shorter run lengths while trying to produce less waste and achieve additional cost savings.”

The introduction of Bellissima came from System Print’s long-term reprographics supplier, Carl Ostermann Erben (COE). “We’ve worked with Torben Segelken at COE for many years; the COE team has a good understanding of our business needs. When Torben approached us with Bellissima print samples and presented the technology, we knew that this was something which would benefit our business and customers.”

“We ran initial tests of Bellissima on press. The results were stunning – we achieved offset-like quality, exceptional fade to zeros, and could print fine-tinted and reverse text at tiny point sizes without any degradation. The tests rapidly progressed to production jobs, and we began to explore the technology further.”

“The customer’s needs dictate how productive we can be. If we can occupy a press with long runs, we are happy, but increasingly we see a trend to produce shorter runs; this has a negative knock-on effect for production as there’s a lot of downtime during wash-ups. The team at COE offered support and suggested that we explore a project to reduce the number of spot colors used in the process.”

“We considered one option of moving to Expanded Color Gamut (ECG) – this was something that COE had an excellent experience of and was confident in Bellissima’s abilities to achieve ECG printing. Another option suggested was to explore the gamut of Bellissima with just our process CMYK. We considered this an exciting project and, if successful, would significantly reduce the costs involved in production.”

System Print began a project with COE and one particular brand owner, Land Juweel, a family-run potato farming and packaging company based in The Netherlands.

Land Juweel was already benefitting from Bellissima’s increased image fidelity; as Phillip explains, “Since we introduced Bellissima to our customers, they have been impressed with the uplift in quality. In particular, the sharper edges of their imagery are more vibrant, and the fine text and details are more legible, especially at small point sizes.”

Hitpaß continues: “In the past, we needed to run jobs like this by using CMYK + 2 spot colors. We conducted preliminary tests to match the spot colors and were pleasantly surprised at the results with Bellissima; we achieved the target with a fixed palette of just CMYK. With Land Juweel’s support, we now print its labels using just four colors. They see this as a fantastic result as our production has reduced the use of inks and solvents to produce more environmentally friendly labels for the brand.”

“These positive results using Bellissima has enhanced our relationships with many customers – we look forward to continuing working with this level of quality for many years ahead,” concludes Dimitri Jansen, Head of sales at System Print.