Wine, chocolate, a supermarket brochure and sustainable new retail packaging took out top honours at this year's prestigious Pride In Print industry awards.
The big winner this year was Gravure Packaging Ltd of Wellington, who took home four awards for its work with Whittaker’s and Balnea.
The Whittaker’s Dark Almond 250g block wrapper took out best in category for flexible packaging and best in gravure process. Pride In Print judges said the images of almonds in pieces of chocolate on the Whittaker’s Dark Almond 250g block, “were so realistic that they were almost good enough to eat.” But the skill of producing the packaging at speed was what really impressed. The packaging was run on a modified gravure HD cylinder engraving press at high speeds, giving it an extremely sharp image. “Gold is particularly hard to run in gravure, and it’s an outstanding effort, said judge Mark Thian.
Gravure Packaging’s sustainable soap wrapper it produced for Balnea also wowed judges. The company redesigned the heat sealable layer to save around 4000kg of PET plastic film and 2600kg of petrochemical wax from landfill each year. Gravure managing director, Greg Chapman said they formulated the heat sealable packaging function in response to a request to make the already plastic-free packaging into one that was also biodegradable.
A New World brochure entered by Ovato NZ also won best in category for industry development and creativity as well as the best web heatset printing process.
While Rapid Labels won best in category for the digital printing of a boutique wine label – The Tortoise and the Hare 2016 Pinot Noir.
Pride In Print’s awards programme is seen as the annual benchmarking event for the printing, packaging, signage and graphic arts industries and attracts hundreds of entries nationwide each year.
