The business, which has diversified its services over the past few years, now specialises in branded confectionery for promotional campaigns, events and product launches and required the faster and more cost-effective kit to support its expansion.
The SurePress was installed at the Leighton Buzzard-based firm’s 1,858sqm premises in the summer and handles its short-run, personalised label and packaging production.
The company had previously used 24in Canon printers, which it has retained, and outsourced other work.
It can now produce up to 100,000 labels per week at peak times, 50% of which go through the SurePress. It had previously quoted a lead time of two weeks to its customers but this is now reduced to under a week.
The Sweet People managing director Steve Hastie said: “Our business operates on a ‘we need it yesterday’ basis so outsourcing work wasn’t always quick enough and we were also paying the prices that trade label suppliers were charging us.
“This machine enables us to control costs a bit better but more importantly service the demand that we have in the giveaways market. Brexit killed our industry up until September but it’s been full-on since then and we’ve gone from famine to feast.
“Now the market has come flying back we’re geared up to cope with the increase in capacity without necessarily having to recruit more people.”
The SurePress uses SurePress AQ inks which are low migration for PET, PP and PE and meet food regulation standards, which was a key investment consideration for The Sweet People.
The business is running the device alongside an offline die-cutting machine that die-cuts, varnishes, strips and slices the labels.
The Sweet People has a turnover of around £4m and 50 staff, four of whom work in the print department.
It rebranded to The Sweet People from Liquid Lens on 1 October. The business was originally established by Hastie 19 years ago to produce domed labels and sell doming systems used to produce the labels.
“That business is niche, though still continues, but we have since become the UK’s leading supplier of corporate branded confectionery, which we’re about to take into Europe in January,” said Hastie.
“With Brexit, the one good thing that did happen was that the currency went in our favour selling sweets to Germany and we’ve picked up a few really big German distributors for the promo market.
“They love what we do because it doesn’t really exist in Germany. We’re now setting up The Sweet People GMBH, an office in Germany, to help us get what we do into Europe.”
