It has been said that we are living in a “parcel economy” since mail-order volumes boomed during the pandemic. While the majority of corrugated boxes have no or little print, brands are warming to the idea of using this real estate for branding or promotional purposes. This will not only drive print volumes in general, it will require higher-quality graphics, just-in-time production and even some customization or personalization.

All the requirements point towards inkjet as the dominant technology for these applications. Inkjet is the only digital technology able to cover the formats required in corrugated print. Inkjet can also cope with the uneven surfaces of corrugated boards.

Although inkjet is still relatively new to the corrugated printing industry, there are already plenty of  choices. Several types of inkjet printers exist for corrugated and the closely related POS/display market. In post-print, flat corrugated boards are used as substrate. This is the most widely used process, typically done by flexo presses today. Inkjet comes in different combinations of productivity and automation, with high-end automated presses and manual feed entry level presses using page-wide inkjet heads. Scanning head flatbed large-format printers can and are producing print on corrugated as well, although possible volumes are much lower.