No Shrinking Market For Shrink Sleeves

Market Review: Label Technology by By Noel Jeffrey

Shrink sleeves or shrink-wrap labels, undeniably the hottest among today’s trends, are single layer films printed on either a flexo or rotogravure press, although gravure is the dominant process. Once printed, the labels are unrolled, slit into strips, and formed into a tube with a secured seam, then re-rolled for application machinery. The application line consists of an apparatus to separate the labels, slip each individual label over the entire package, and then send it to a heating unit that shrinks the film onto the bottle or can.

Rick Whipple, vice president of sales and marketing OSIO Labels in Anaheim, Ca., explains the evolution: “Arizona Iced Tea started the bandwagon and others jumped on. Then Nestlé began using sleeves for their Coffeemate non-dairy creamer product and went from an average market share to as high as 60 percent. That’s remarkable and shows the power of that packaging. Customers will continue to get on that band wagon.”

Additional markets that will expand in the coming years:

• Full length sleeves (half sleeves in the future)
• Decorative inks (metallic, thermochromatic, pearlescent)
• More plastic containers
• Innovative container shape (designed specifically for sleeves)
• Markets beyond food & beverage

Indeed, Alcoa is spearheading at least one of these trends—decorative inks. Several business units in the company and its ink suppliers collaborated to develop a prototype label for PET bottles that features two new ink technologies. The PET “Fluid!” water bottle sports a 50-micron PETG rotogravure, reverse-printed shrink sleeve. The first is a new interference “flip” ink that changes from one color to another as the label is tilted. In addition to the reverse printed inks, a pearlescent, white tint ink is surface-printed on the label’s water droplets and top copy to add depth to these areas. Alcoa Flexible Packaging is making these print technologies available on any shrink sleeve substrate.

Howard Millstein, president of Ameri-Seal in Chatsworth, Calif., and OSIO’s Whipple may be competing printers but they are both shrink sleeve evangelists as well. “Little by little, customers are switching from pressure sensitive labels to full sleeves,” Millstein says. “Companies are looking for shelf presence through unique shapes. Sleeves are way to do this because you can’t put a pressure sensitive on the front and back of some of these surfaces and some of the new shapes won’t fit into silk screening equipment. Sleeves also offer more real estate for information and since the process is reverse printed, it is completely product resistant.”

Millstein also points out that although people perceive shrink sleeves as a more expensive alternative to pressure sensitive labels and they can be, customers have to make sure they are making a legitimate comparison. “It really depends on the materials you’re comparing,” he says. What’s more, Millstein points out that improving technology continues to streamline the process and lower costs. “Three to four years ago the shrink factor for a label was 60 percent,” he says. “Today with PETG, we can achieve an 80 percent shrink factor.”

Whipple, whose company’s printing plant is in South Korea, notes that they also sell Korean PVC to domestic printers who are their competitors. “Domestic suppliers continue to reduce their costs. Today it’s at least 20 percent less than three years ago. It’s an evolution,” Whipple says.

“I’ve never seen anything like the growth of popularity for shrink sleeves over the last five years,” he continues. “I’ve even seen it used on products like potted plants and candles. The process can adapt to any container, and the technology has improved so that now a shrink line can do 500 bottles a minute. That’s nine a second. When the technology was introduced in the 1980s a result of the Tylenol tampering case, the machines could only apply 100 labels per minute. And today, these faster machines are half the price.”