Standup bag packs a punch

Award: Gold for Printing Achievement

Winner: Nonni's Food pita chip snack bag (Nestlé)

To achieve a bold, new look for snackfoods that jumps off the shelf and to produce a standup pouch that's cost-effective at the same time isn't an easy proposition—ask any converter. But Genpak (www.genpak.com) used its Opaltone digital separation software from Opaltone (www.opaltone.com) to create luxurious and appetizing effects for the panels on a bag containing New York Style Lightly Salted Organic Pita Chips from Nonni's Food. The pita-chip segment is growing fast in the deli-snack category and New York Style is a recognized leader.

Replacing a glossy package, the new, zippered, standup bag is a three-ply material featuring a matte-finish PP film that conveys a more natural, organic look, which was Nonni's intent. There are 10 New York Style varieties now merchandised in the matte-finish package construction.

Specifications

The bagstock is made with Supermet 222 liter high-metal-adhesion metallized PET film from Celplast Metallized Products (cmp.celplast.com) that Genpak says affords superior bonds and a stable structure. The other ply is a sealant layer laminated to the middle Supermet polyester layer.

Genpak, which took a Gold for Printing Achievement, produces the bagstock on a pouch machine from GN Packaging Equipment (www.gnpak.com) and reverse-prints the outer matte film flexographically in eight Opaltone colors on a Fischer+Krecke (www.fischer-krecke.de) press. Genpak uses the Opaltone software, CMYK as well as process red, process green and process blue to create all of the graphic images and the spot colors.

This creates deep and realistic images because red, green and blue increase the color densities, says Genpak's development manager, Bill Reilly. "The advantage to printing with Opaltone is that all images and colors can be made out of CMYK and red, blue and green plus white. It's also cost-effective and environmentally-friendly because we eliminate time, solvents and ink waste that would occur from washing up the colors."

According to Reilly, with Opaltone images can be made up of magenta and yellow as well as red, which makes product imagery more vibrant. "We're basically doing the same thing with an extra layer of ink that additional coats of paint can do to the color density of a wall," he notes.