Over 500 guests gathered last night at the prestigious Label Industry Global Awards ceremony in Brussels to find out which of the 17 finalist companies would be walking away with a much coveted industry gong. The 12th annual awards event was held at Brussels Expo as part of Labelexpo Europe 2015.

Kurt Walker, FINAT’s former president was presented with the much esteemed R. Stanton Avery Lifetime Achievement Award. Sponsored by Avery Dennison, the award is given to an individual who has made a substantial and key contribution to the label industry over a minimum of 25 years. Kurt received the award in recognition of his work with FINAT and in driving innovation and best practice throughout the international label community. Kurt joins the industry’s echelons with previous winners including Suzanne Zaccone of GSI Technologies, Tomas Rink of Ritrama, RotoMetric’s Steve Lee, Helmut Schreiner, Nilpeter’s Lars Eriksen and FLEXcon’s Neil McDonough.

HP Indigo was revealed as the winner of the Award for Innovation (for companies with more than 300 employees), sponsored by Flint Group Narrow Web. HP Indigo won the gong for its work in developing its HP SmartStream Mosaic software. Started by a request from Coca-Cola Israel to create a unique variable product with shelf appeal following the success of the Share a Coke customized name campaign on Coke bottles, HP Indigo has delivered the ability to create millions of unique images and designs on labels and packaging from seed patterns using an innovative graphics algorithm. 

The Award for Innovation (for companies with up to 300 employees), sponsored by Flint Group Narrow Web went to joint recipients GEW and Lake Image Systems. GEW impressed the judges with its RHINO electronic power supply which has been developed to enable the lowest possible operating cost for a UV-curing system, operating at 95% energy efficiency to provide an extremely low energy consumption and environmental footprint the lowest carbon footprint and the lowest utility bill.

Lake Image Systems was honored for developing MaxScan, its latest addition to the Discovery MultiScan family. Based on contact scanning technology its MaxScan provides key benefits over traditional line scan camera technology, such as uniform 600dpi inspection resolution and virtually no angular variation, to provide label converters with tools to accurately detect print defects without the need for expensive additional rollers, re-designed web paths or complex optical assemblies.

Lintec was announced as the winner of the Award for Sustainability, sponsored by Xeikon.  Lintec has developed a new label facestock, KP5000, which uses the world's highest percentage (80%) of recycled PET pellets. The new face material, which has physical features equivalent to virgin PET films and has a lower production cost than other recycled materials, is produced from mechanically recycled PET bottles as the raw material. 

Mike Fairley, chair of the judges commented: “Choosing winners from such an impressive list of companies was always going to be difficult and all of our winners and finalists truly deserve our utmost admiration and congratulations. The awards are designed to showcase the depth and best of talent and achievement across the global label industry and all of this year’s entrants demonstrated enormous innovation, best practice and inspiring work. The awards go some way towards shining a light on the significant dedication, commitment and excellence going on each and every day in this exciting and dynamic sector.”

Judges for this year’s awards, under the chairmanship of Mike Fairley were: Thomas Hagmaier, president of FINAT, Andy Thomas, group managing editor of Labels & Labeling, Armin Karl Geiger, editor of NarrowWebTech, Steve Katz, editor of Label & Narrow Web and Anthony White, label industry consultant.