Stanpac, with three North American locations (Totowa, New Jersey; Brenham, Texas; and Queretaro, México) in addition to its headquarters in Smithville, Ontario, has experienced explosive growth in the ice cream and food-service packaging business since early 2020. Running 24/7 and maxing out its press capacity, the company recently installed a Speedmaster XL 106 from OEM Heidelberg at its Smithville production facility to continue to keep up with the growing demands of its customers. When COVID-19 hit, Stanpac’s business “suddenly changed overnight,” said Murray Bain, Vice President of Sales & Marketing. The company, who primarily produces cartons and other packaging for the ice cream and food-service industries, saw a rapid increase in business when consumers were isolated at home.
Printing capacity doubled
Thanks to its dedicated staff and loyal suppliers, the company was able to navigate the increasing requests, but after 3 years of 24/7 shifts and maxed-out press capacity, “our labour was maxed out, sales were becoming capped, and lead times were getting longer,” Bain added.” With the September 2022 installation of the XL 106, Stanpac is now better equipped to operate more efficiently, optimize its production schedule, and alleviate the stress on its production crew. In fact, the new press has doubled the plant’s offset printing capacity and contributed to the company’s best sales year ever! Alongside a 2013 Heidelberg XL 106, Stanpac’s new press, which runs at 18,000 sheets per hour, is both an upgrade in speed and technology due to Heidelberg’s new intelligent User Experience and patented Intellistart 3 system that provide support for operators during the press run, and automatically determine the makeready processes required for jobs to be produced.
Stanpac’s newest XL 106 also includes Prinect Inpress Control 3, an industry-leading inline spectrophotometer that measures and controls colour and registers on the fly, as well as Inspection Control 3, which automatically scans the printed sheet for any defects. The built-in technologies are helping Stanpac shorten press runs and reduce waste sheets, which is essential given today’s lingering supply-chain shortages. “We’re better able to predict how much material it will actually take to run a job, now that everything gets set up quickly and any errors are fixed swiftly,” Bain pointed out. The short make-readies allow Stanpac to easily change between short runs for specialty, seasonal ice cream flavours, and very long runs for brands’ “staple” flavours. “Our customers want top-quality, high-end print, and many of them want smaller order sizes, some have as many as 70 flavours, so we run quite a large number of products. This press allows us to do that.”
Stanpac also relies on Prinect Production Manager for the flexibility to send files to either of its two Heidelberg presses, which run using a similar set of Saphira Consumables, depending on the schedule. According to Bain, “the workflow and consumables allow us to choose where we want to run a job – and we know regardless of press, that it will turn out exactly the same.” Stanpac also utilizes Prinect for its metric reports to evaluate efficiency and throughput to identify areas for improvement. Due to its newly increased capacity, Stanpac also has time to upgrade some features of its older XL 106, which has led to further improvements in the plant’s overall productivity. Additional efforts to keep up with the demands from both current and new customers include adding new finishing equipment as well as a new 40,000-sq.-ft. facility to be built in Smithville.
