The job, for a Jaunary issue of The Sunday Telegraph, was fulfilled using its CMC Polystream lines and Buhrs polywrapper, which underwent a £500,000 upgrade last year.

Paul Brady, printing director of Telegraph Media Group, said: "We set Polestar the challenge to bag a product that we knew would be a first for a newspaper supplement.

"With a great deal of testing and the commitment to make it work, the team at Sheffield rose to the challenge and we are delighted with the results, as were hundreds of thousands of our readers."

Polestar Sheffield account director Jeff White said the deal was a "significant step forward in terms of what we can do for publishers, their advertisers and their readers".

"Our operations and engineering teams have been working for many months on line modifications that allowed us to feed this unusual product successfully, thereby meeting Telegraph Media Group’s requirements," he added.