Russell Stogbauer operates the HP Indigo 20000 Digital Press at ePac LLC

Digital printing’s share of packaging production remains small—a recent drupa report put it at only 7% of the total. Within that narrow slice is the still smaller subcategory of digitally printed flexible packaging. Machine limitations, substrate issues, and the iron grip of flexography have all played their parts in keeping digital printing processes mostly at the fringes of the film-based packaging market. 

This doesn’t mean that the segment doesn’t have a digital future or that ambitious digital printing entrepreneurs don’t want to be in on it. Smithers Pira says that the global market for flexible packaging will grow by 3.4% per year through 2020, by which point it should be worth nearly $250 billion. Convinced that it has both the technology and the business model to seize some of the opportunity with digital production, a start-up printing company in Madison, WI, is going after a piece of the action.