Cans. You rely on them to bring your product into your customers’ hands. You want them to be unique to your brand, recyclable and safe to sip from. And as a brewer, chances are that you also need them to be produced and delivered swiftly, which can sometimes prove to be a challenge, especially for craft brewers looking to buy in smaller batches.
By using digital technology to print CMYK designs directly onto the cans, companies have been able to come up with a solution that allows for skipping the printing plates and setup time altogether. As a result, it can provide breweries with quicker turnaround times, and quotes based on the total quantity of cans instead of on the number of SKUs that they need.
Now, that brings a lot of versatility. Just imagine how many versions of your brewery’s original design you could play with. The more versions you would create, the more the process would become a key part of your brand positioning.
In a world where image is life, this is everything.
Aside from versatility, speed to market is another huge advantage of the digital printing process. While an entire order fulfilled in a few minutes used to be something that we could only dream of, it is now totally doable, although bigger quantities could of course take up to two or three days before being ready to go.
Food safety is also a major aspect of the beverage industry, and knowing how safe the final product is needs to be determined. Making sure that can decorating is categorically safe is vital. Once the cans are printed, a varnish is overlaid and thermally cured to ensure that they not only meet, but further exceed all food safety requirements.
Environmental considerations should also be factored into your company’s decision to go digital. Being 100 % recyclable, digitally printed cans can be environmentally friendly and, with digital production, able to eliminate minimum order constraints as well as the additional plastic shrink sleeves or labels.
Shipping to the US every week and serving since January 2020, a company named SoluCan brought some much-needed flexibility to the table. SoluCan takes care of all the import process, from the customs paperwork to the door-to-door delivery and everything in between. Based in Canada, the founders say that their turnaround time is typically about three to four weeks, but that it varies since the scope of the quantities that they support is so wide. With more than 50 years of combined experience in the beverage industry, they know how crucial the cycle time is to any craft brewery.
Among all the can-decorating options out there, digital direct-to-can printing eliminates waste, improves creative options in terms of variable data and shorter runs, and enables a faster time to market.
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