One of the more active growth areas for print service providers and of printing equipment development is corrugated, and for good reason. Estimates of corrugated shipments in North America are in excess of 420 billion square feet and growing. That translates to approximately 100 billion boxes per year. There are a number of drivers for this growth, with the most obvious being the expansion of ecommerce. There are many different uses of corrugated boxes, and many different ways to decorate the box. For printing equipment manufacturers, converters, and print service providers the most appealing is “high graphics.” We are not talking about the brown box with the “swish,” we are talking about the boxes that have litho label/laminate or are just directly printed with colorful eye-catching graphics using a single or multi process using three or more colors. Examples would be food and beverage, household products, etc., and is estimated to be 20% to 30% of overall corrugated volume with approximately 20% of that classified as “low hanging fruit,” which means it is easy to identify and move to digital for cost reasons, production reasons, or customer requirements.

Historically the primary process for high graphic corrugated used the multi-process label/laminate approach with offset, flexo and even gravure printed graphics on a top sheet and then laminated to the corrugated base. Captured in the “low hanging fruit” definition is litho laminate/label work typically outsourced to third-party print providers that converters are now bringing in-house to run on their single-pass digital presses.

Scanning head or multi-pass production digital presses have been used in the production of corrugated packaging and displays for quite a few years for a small subset of high graphics production. In the past three years, single-pass digital production systems have entered the market, greatly increasing digital’s production footprint. With the added capacity of these single-pass presses, converters have begun to migrate a significant portion of their top sheet business from litho to digital. A recent and ongoing study by Karstedt Partners has identified how the shift from litho to digital is happening and by what technology. This shift can be attributed to the introduction of single-process corrugated printing presses that print directly on the corrugated material eliminating the lamination process. Currently, these production inkjet machines are primarily from Barberan, EFI and HP.