Dortmund (Germany)/Bocholt (Belgium) – After the successful premiere of Direct Print Powered by KHS™ at MARTENS Brewery with their Dagschotel ‘talking bottles’ launch, MARTENS Brewery based in Bocholt, Belgium, is again leveraging their Direct Print industrial scale digital printing technology from KHS, this time to renovate the look and feel of their own brand, MARTENS Pils, by eliminating labels altogether resulting in a visually appealing, premium and more sustainable PET package.  

MARTENS Pils will soon be on-shelf in selected markets with the new digitally decorated PET format.  With the elimination of paper labels, the digital decoration accentuates MARTENS’ commitment to sustainability while bringing a certain ‘cool’ look which supports premium positioning of their brand in PET.  “We are driven by innovation in new technologies, processes and products. Direct Print technology replaces the label of our standard Pils and we are now creating a more premium  look and feel for our own brand”, says Jan Martens, owner of MARTENS Brewery. 

With the packaging change for MARTENS Pils PET bottles, the Belgian brewer is taking its innovative approach to marketing one step further. In the summer of 2015 MARTENS introduced Dagschotel beer by breathing virtual life into its high-quality digitally printed PET-bottles with the help of a specifically developed smartphone app which recognizes pixel patterns on the decorated bottles bringing enhanced reality to packaging with animated bottles.  Single bottles printed with characters from the Flemish TV-sitcom “F.C. Kampioenen” brought some fun, and then scanning two bottles together brought lively exchanges between the movie characters printed on the bottles. 

This Dagschotel campaign raised great interest in the beverage industry –  innovative consumer interactivity  magnified by the revolutionary technology MARTENS used to bring it to life: Direct Print Powered by KHS™, which is the first industrial-scale, digital printing process with low-migration LED UV-cured inks for  food-safe decoration of PET bottles – a small revolution in the beverage industry to which KHS and their digital printing technology co-development partners  have dedicated  ten years developing.   “We are pleased to see MARTENS switch from labels to Direct Print for their brand and really like the resulting premium positioning of PET with minimalist digital decoration”, explains Phil Johnson, Managing Director NMP Systems. "We greatly appreciate MARTENS innovation vision and look forward to even more digital decoration consumer engagement ideas… coming soon.”

The Direct Print team at KHS will be bringing new technical features to their next version equipment which will go to MARTENS mid-2016 – bringing even higher quality decorations and the capability to individualize each bottle with variable image capability – at a higher level of industrial performance.