Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com, and I’m here today with Paul Bean who is Managing Director of Sun Branding Solutions, which is part of Sun Chemical. Welcome Paul.
Paul Bean: Good morning.
Cary Sherburne: We’re here at the Pantone Live Announcement in London and you’re going to be talking to us a little bit about – Paul Bean is going to be talking about Heinz Beanz.
Paul Bean: Exactly, Mr. Bean and Heinz Beanz.
Cary Sherburne: This will be interesting. There you go. So maybe you could tell us a little about the work that you’ve been doing with Heinz as they’ve led up to this announcement of Pantone Live and why Pantone Live had been important in that process.
Paul Bean: Well, we were acquired by Sun chemical six years ago and Pantone Live, in its initial conception was a product called Smartcom, which we were involved with, which was ultimately to take color standards into the modern day digital age. So this was taking color science, material science and turn that with a relevance to end product because everything had an end product, whether this is for the internet, whether this is for print, therefore, if it’s going to print, it needs to be relevant to ink. So, we were – we got involved six years ago and worked through that program and more recently we’ve been involved with Pantone as they’ve turned it into Pantone Live and developed their products even further. And Heinz was one of our existing clients that through brand diversification had expanded across categories, increased the portfolio of their branded products and was increasingly incurring issues on a mixture of substrates, so…
Cary Sherburne: So, I understand, originally they were working with Paper labels on cans…
Paul Bean: Absolutely.
Cary Sherburne: ...that was one thing, but then now they’ve moved into shrink wrap and…
Paul Bean: So nowadays it’s all PP, its polypropylene, its reverse, its surface printing and it’s over every print process that’s available in the marketplace. So, of course, color standards that they are a very different dynamics than historical color management piece, and then when you throw that over international, global and hundreds of countries, and lost in translation, it just become a bigger and bigger problem. So we explained to Heinz, they were an existing client, they bought into the theory and allowed us to use their most famous brand, the Heinz Beanz, and we’ve pretty much worked with them over the last 18 months to deliver a reduction of what was across their product portfolio adultery of a minimum of 8.9 down to a, now a controllable 1.5, which in modern day terms is astounding. So it’s a fantastic result.
Cary Sherburne: Now so, and from what I understand from hearing you speak earlier, they were working with five different printers in five different countries and…
Paul Bean: Right, that was the…
Cary Sherburne: designers and…
Paul Bean: … Yeah, that was the scope of the project that we took on. Obviously, they’re using far more printers and in far more countries than that, but this was to prove the concept. And I mean, it was taking over five printers, five countries…
Cary Sherburne: And four different processes.
Paul Bean: And four different print processes.
Cary Sherburne: Yeah, so now, from the concept from the designer all the way through to the production and getting the product on the shelf, you have a consistent color specification that everyone can work from.
Paul Bean: Absolutely. It’s a standard that scientifically has been proven so this is all the very latest spectral data collection, data control, so we know there’s a predictability about the end result. So it drives the brand with consistency, with color comfort, that the brand and their… because the color ultimately is a fundamental part of the brand’s DNA. So that knowing that wherever this is reproduced, is going to be predictable, we can control that, we can qualify, it takes it so far forward from where we’d been historically. It’s fund-, it's a revolution for our industry.
Cary Sherburne: So, no the next step for Heinz is going to be dealing with the yellow on the pasta packages and then maybe they’ll get to the red on my favorite, Heinz Catsup.
Paul Bean: Ohh, but they would – well we can’t talk about that.
Cary Sherburne: Maybe, I said maybe.
Paul Bean: A step at a time.
Cary Sherburne: on my favorite package of Heinz Ketchup.
Paul Bean: Exact… so the blue’s been achieved…
Cary Sherburne: Yeah.
Paul Bean: The yellow is next on the success of the blue. And who knows else, hopefully. And we get the results on the yellow and prove the concept again that we may be given red to take it even further. That’s our ambition.
Cary Sherburne: You know, as Americans, we like lots of ice and we like lots of ketchup. So… not big on beans, but that’s all right.
Paul Bean: Next time.
Cary Sherburne: Thank you very much.
Paul Bean: Pleasure. Thank you.