This is a guest post by Barry Briggs.
Barry Briggs, president of Inovatek Glass Innovations Ltd. has lived in the Okanagan Valley, Kelowna, BC, Canada since 1994. He has been instrumental in developing, patenting and successfully producing the first Digital Ceramic labels for Architectural Glass known as “DecoTherm”. This was featured in US Glass Magazine and went on to win a Technical Excellence Award from the Society of Glass and Ceramic Decorators, (SGCD), in Arlington Virginia.
Barry has shifted his digital interests to Glass wine bottles and recognized that applied ceramic labels (ACL) by current screen printing was far too expensive to produce and environmentally damaging. It requires extreme heat energy, uses unsafe cadmium colours and the bottle cannot be recycled. Therefore a new patent pending, digital label has been developed, by Inovatek, that is environmentally friendly and has a similar and improved look as the current screen printed label.
Thousands of colours can be produced at no extra cost.
This product named “DecoVin” is printed in roll form and transfer printed to bottles at speeds up to 300 bottles per minute using existing bottle fill/label equipment making it extremely cost-effective.
In fact, pricing that rivals the cost of paper labels.
Currently, there are three Bottle Screen Printing facilities in California that are screen printing to near capacity. One facility in Napa Valley has more than 600 clients equating to roughly 50,000 screen-printed bottles per day. This firm has expanded from a 41,000 sq. ft. building to a new 82,000 sq. ft. warehouse production facility. This high square footage requirement is the need to store, screenprint and fire at extreme heat, pallet loads of glass bottles which are then re-packaged, palletized and shipped to respective wineries.
DecoVin in contrast prints the patent-pending, “No Label Look” labels with raised print, directly to paper rolls at high speed. This eliminates the high cost of mass storage facilities as there is no need to transfer heavy glass bottles. As mentioned previously the lightweight paper label rolls are economically sent directly to the winery for bottle application using standard labellers in the bottle fill line.
Advantages of DecoVin labels
| Comparison | DecoVin-3D | Silk Screen-ACL |
|---|---|---|
| Cost Effective | Yes | No |
| Unlimited Colours | Yes | No Max 9. Extra cost per colour plus screen |
| High-speed printing | Yes | No |
| Environmentally Friendly | Yes | No High heat required using a furnace |
| Bottle Recyclable | Yes | No |
| Cadmium based unsafe inks | No | Yes |
| High speed label application speed up to 300 BPM | Yes | No |
| Label applied with standard labeller / filler line | Yes | No |
| Bottles require shipping to and from outside screen print line manufacturer = extra cost | No | Yes |
