That was the goal of Chesapeake’s Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Division, a global producer of consumer packaging that supplies some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies with innovative packaging and print services using the latest web-flexo systems. 

 

Given the health and financial impact of counterfeit drugs, with approximately 10 percent of all pharmaceuticals in the global supply chain being counterfeit, Chesapeake wanted to ensure that its customers’ brand colors were consistent on different substrates. Any brand color inconsistency could present an opportunity for counterfeiters and make the product suspect.

 

Chesapeake turned to Pantone and the Sun Chemical Color Management team to help them bring consistency and control across all the materials in the production process and make certain that brand colors were right every time on every possible packaging material.

 

“Our goal was to create a digital palette of all the ink colors we use in our printing,” says Jon Drennan, operations director at Chesapeake’s Leicester facility in the UK. “We wanted to build a set of data that would represent a given color and use that data to recreate the color exactly the same every time, regardless of substrate.”

 

PantoneLIVE is an ecosystem that allows brand owners and print services suppliers to manage and maintain color assets through a cloud-based repository. Using the program, brand owners and print providers can store and share key color assets to manage and communicate colors accurately anywhere in the world. 

 

One Chesapeake customer, a maker of an over-the-counter drug, was experiencing a complaint rate of 10 percent, far above the industry standard of .5 percent. Out of a batch of 600 products, more than 60 were being sent back. Within a year of implementing PantoneLIVE, the customer’s rejection rate dropped to zero.

 

There were added benefits for Chesapeake. They used fewer raw materials because they can align customer expectations with designs which can be approved before production, which gets the packaging to market sooner. The improved processes helped Chesapeake increase yield by 5 percent and reduce print production waste by 18 percent.

 

Supported by licensed hardware and software that enable each area of a packaging supply chain to access the same colors, PantoneLIVE provides consistent and repeatable color across product families, regardless of media or print technology, providing a cohesive brand approach. 

 

Over the course of 18 months, Chesapeake worked with the PantoneLIVE team to digitize every color Chesapeake uses. By digitizing its palette, Chesapeake was able to produce a digital proof that represented exactly what would be done on press. 

 

Chesapeake also turned to Sun Chemical for inks because of the company’s global support capabilities. Sun Chemical has the capability of taking the digital color communication from PantoneLIVE to create the correct ink formula at any printing location worldwide. 

 

Digital proofing let Chesapeake test a design with its customers and speed up the overall approval process, resulting in a faster time to market and the lower costs associated with greater efficiencies. 

 

“The job of a printer is to deliver a print product that represents what the designer created and what the brand owner expects across different print mediums,” Drennan says. “Digitizing the palette took the subjectivity out of the process. And the resulting color consistency exceeds the brand owners’ expectations.” 

 

Sun Chemical 

(973) 404-6000; www.sunchemical.com