The direct-to-shape printing system has been installed inside the MyMuesli store located in the town of Heidelberg in Germany.
MyMuesli started off in 2007 as an online business that tapped into the German love of the foodstuff by creating bespoke muesli mixes. It subsequently expanded its offering into high street stores, and now has 30 such outlets in Germany, Austria and Switzerland with more on the way.
The Jetmaster Dimension has been set up with a touch-screen tablet frontend offering customers six different templates for their personalised messages. The designs are suitable for a range of special occasions and are married with a pre-printed generic outer pack with blank areas.
“With this installation we are moving into an area I find very interesting, a new world of the packaging business that is not about volume, but about personalisation and individualisation,” said Heidelberg head of equipment Stephan Plenz. “Our dream is to have this type of machine in every MyMuesli shop worldwide and in other shops of the world.
“The second application is having these machines in factories for putting personalised messages on packaging,” he added.
The templates include four-colour images, but not the ability to upload the customer’s own pictures at this time, although this may follow in future.
The custom-printed packs are 575g cylinders, with a conventionally printed outer that has a special coating, applied by the packaging printer that supplies them to MyMuesli. The coating makes the pack suitable for inkjet overprinting.
The pack is mounted onto the robotic arm within the Jetmaster Dimension, which then moves and rotates it under the printheads as the customer’s message is printed in two inkjet swathes. Pinning takes place using LED-UV after each colour, with the final drying by UV.
The process takes less than five minutes, with shop staff trained in the operation of the printer.
MyMuesli co-founder Max Wittrock said: “We hope people will queue day and night to get these muesli tubes – let’s see. We are still in the start-up phase but this is definitely the most sophisticated muesli printer in the world!”
MyMuesli charges €14.90 (£10.80), a €7 premium on the standard pack price for the personalisation option.
“People will Instagram it or Twitter it when they get their box. We’re going to put a background up in the store for that,” Wittrock added. “This project has been so much fun and Heidelberg have been a great team to work with. Let’s see where this goes, we have lots of plans for the future and we both believe in learning from this test.”
Plenz said the machine had gone in on a leasing deal with click charge, and that the financial model for future Jetmaster Dimension installations would depend on the customer’s specific application and likely print volumes.
“We are also talking to big sports brands about putting it into their flagship stores,” he added.
The larger format Jetmaster Dimension 1000, which can print on objects 500mm wide and more than 1m in length, is likely to be shown at Drupa next year.
