Pragati executes world’s biggest digital printing project

Pragati Pack, a subsidiary of the Pragati group of Indian printing houses that specializes in the packaging market, has achieved one of its greatest milestones by successfully printing the world’s largest fully variable packaging design project.

With 10 million unique cigarette packs to be printed for an FMCG brand, this was by far one of the biggest, most challenging and creatively fulfilling projects the company has undertaken.

On getting the project, Hemanth Paruchuri, CEO of Pragati Pack, says: ‘The team at the FMCG company wanted to do something unique. They liked a liquor bottle that was unique due to the changing blue cobalt design on every individual bottle. They spoke to the board manufacturing company to put dye in the board to try and make each pack unique, but they couldn’t do it. So, we pitched to them the idea of printing the packs digitally.’

As Indian law prohibits the advertising of cigarette packs, the FMCG company opted for the digital route for point of sale promotion. The percentage of warning signs appearing on the pack is also regulated by law. Paruchuri says, ‘We have produced cigarette packs in the past and understand critical quality registration requirements. We put all the check marks. While printing these packs, the blanks had to maintain a tolerance of +/- 0.6mm so the percentage of the warning sign was in line with legal requirements.’

This was going to be the biggest digitally printed project in the world. Pragati therefore conducted in-house trials before committing to the project.

Challenges

Paruchuri says, ‘One of the challenges was creation of artwork. While the designers at the FMCG company created a detailed artwork, HP’s proprietary Mosaic software auto-generated 10 million unique designs using its special algorithm from 24 seed designs or vector artworks.’

Another challenge was getting a swoosh design element on every pack as per the customer’s demand. The company also requested the inner flap of the pack to have the name of the artform that inspired the base design.

The HP India team worked hand in hand with the Israel headquarters to ensure a smooth execution of the entire project. Not only did HP share its servers and processors with Pragati, they also ensured that its team of engineers were stationed at the production floor on all the days while printing was being done on the press.

Explaining the massive size of the project, A Appadurai, country manager, India and Sri Lanka, HP Indigo and inkjet presses, says, ‘This project translated to six million impressions on the HP Indigo press which is 1.5 million meters of material printed on an HP Indigo press.’