Learning about Nova Printing and Graphics

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Learning about Nova Printing and Graphics

A high-quality printed package can make that difference in choosing your product, potentially getting you a new customer for life! With a range of barrier, adhesion, and flexibility characteristics to choose from, our Nova casing performs the functions of protecting your product, maximizing product quality, and creating an efficient solution for making a range of products. 

Adding high quality printing not only provides information on the contents; an eye-catching design combined with vivid colors and images that pop can make the difference in sales. Nova casing has a long history of giving our customers performance improvement whether used internally for fast and accurate food production such as pre-sliced or diced products and cheeses to classic consumer retail applications. From deli meats, butter, cheeses, to the rapidly growing pet food and plant based product market, key components for retail products are outstanding graphics, vivid colors and photographic printing.

Our skilled graphics team works closely with customers directly and with graphic design firms to adapt and tailor any design to provide optimal appearance on a casing filled product. Integrating new designs on a tubular casing is often less common in the packaging world and both customers and design agencies rely on our expertise to develop best in class packaging designs. Our team has many years of combined experience in designing products across a range of packaging formats, from shrink bags, films, pouches to tubular casings such as Nova and our Fibrous product. They are truly packaging experts across the wide range of product solutions we offer.

Here are a few interesting aspects of printing on casing that take place in the background yet are key to a great package:
In the printing world the casing material is referred to as a ‘substrate’ which has unique qualities of ink adhesion, material properties and flexibility, all which impact how a design is set up. In our Nova product group we have many different product options or substrates, our team is experienced in both specifying the right product material for the application as well as how that works with our manufacturing processes.

Our Operations team has decades of experience printing with food casing approved ink systems built for the particular casing and application. With Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) certifications at all of our manufacturing plants, we have certified quality and manufacturing processes for all the products we manufacture. Our Nova casing is one of the most efficient and sustainable ways to make a product, with the same casing used in filling the product, thermal processing, cooling, and going straight to a retail application. The printed casing must withstand that process and come out of it looking great. This requires inks that are temperature, water and scuff resistant as well as offering strong durability and color fastness.

Printing with inks uses the CMYK printing process, with pigmented colors of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. Pigment colors are a ‘subtractive’ color model, where adding more ink color, or pigment makes the color progressively darker. Most people think the letter ‘K’ stands for the last letter of the word ‘Black’ (C, Y, and M all use the first letter to represent the corresponding color). Instead, the ‘K’ letter in CMYK means ‘Key’ color. To create pure black, you need pure black pigment and cannot mix the other CMY colors, which in theory, should produce black. So pure black is ‘Key’ to producing a pure black color when using pigments.