Digital label printers are not having much success selling the concept of personalised product labels to their big retail customers.
For months now, those label printers with digital presses have been advancing the idea of personalising labels by region, store or customer, or to reflect seasons or promote events.
They say the lack of origination costs and quick set-up of digital print make it ideal for producing labels with variations such as customer names, event logos or store-specific welcome banners.
But print buyers are not buying. Sarah Nixon, head of marketing at Beziers digital solutions division, admitted: "Personalisation is not an idea we are managing to flog very well. We have found that smaller producers, such as wineries, are seizing the potential, but the only supermarket who is vaguely interested is Iceland, who may use it in their own home shopping service."
Stuart Martin, marketing manager at Simpson Label Company, said big retail customers were holding back because of the difficulty in setting up distribution channels. "You might be able to print labels for Devon scones in Scotland and Scottish scones in Devon easily enough, but you have to make sure they get to their correct destinations and dont get lost in the warehousing."
Alex Hall, packaging innovations technologist at Iceland, agreed: "The scope of digital printing is unlimited, if they can get speeds up and price down. Its a fabulous concept. But the runs we need are huge and the logistics are not in place to deliver different labels to different parts of the country.
"All the supermarkets have the same goals, keeping quality as high as possible while keeping costs down, and I think managers are still a bit nervous to move to digital yet. I think we will start looking at it in closer detail next year."
Graham Jones at Elida Faberg said digital print was still too expensive and too slow. "We have done a study on it and plan to look at it again in five years time," he said.
"To keep costs down we try to use the same packaging as much as possible. For instance, our Lynx deodorant is sold right across Europe yet there are only six variations on the packaging."
Story by Tania Mason