Dortmund (Germany)/Bocholt (Belgium) – Design individual bottles in batches of one or implement special marketing campaigns within a very short time indeed: Direct Print Powered by KHS™ offers beverage producers great flexibility of design, thus giving them the competitive edge. The Martens brewery in Belgium is now making good use of this innovative technology and together with a French supermarket chain is placing specially designed bottles on the shelves for the soccer World Cup.

To mark the big kick-off in Moscow Belgium’s Brouwerij Martens is offering its premium beer in 32 country-specific bottle designs on the French market. Various images of the participating nations have been printed straight onto the PET bottles using Direct Print Powered by KHS™.

Back in 2015 the Belgian brewery was the very first beverage producer to launch directly printed bottles to market produced with the prototype of the Direct Print Powered by KHS™ system. Martens is convinced by the direct digital printing process and will also rely on the innovative technology from NMP Systems and KHS in the future, say the Belgian brewers.

The successor Pilot 1.0 version of Direct Print Powered by KHS™, which includes many new features, is now being used on the Martens production line. Pilot 1.0 incorporates technological additions which permit an even better quality of print at high speeds and enable each individual bottle to be printed with different motifs within a very short space of time. The customer is able to decide whether the individual designs are printed onto the bottles consecutively or at random. An additionally developed printed image inspection system ensures the standard of quality at industrial performance level.

Batches of one with individual motifs
Regardless of whether one or one thousand different bottle designs are printed, individual motifs which are adapted for marketing campaigns or even at the customer’s specific request and produced in the shortest time are possible on the Direct Print machine, giving the beverage producer a clear competitive edge. The short time-to-market phase is particularly ideal for marketing offensives such as the current World Cup push.

The bottles produced using the digital printing process are also 100% recyclable. This was again confirmed last year by the European PET Bottle Platform (EPBP) renewing the certificate granted to the process. PET bottles processed by Direct Print Powered by KHS™ have no negative impact on the rPET and are thus officially approved for bottle-to-bottle PET recycling.

Direct Print Powered by KHS™ gives beverage producers great flexibility of design – such as Brouwerij Martens in Belgium which is launching specially designed bottles to market for the soccer World Cup.