The arrival of spring means Verpakkings Industrie Veenendaal (VIV) has started packing Dutch tomatoes and bell peppers again. “We’ve supplied fruit and vegetable packaging for years, but we’ve seen an obvious trend from blank film to printed packaging,” says manager Weinand van Kesteren.
VIV in Veenendaal, the Netherlands, is a family company that was founded in 1953 as a wholesaler in packaging material. When Weinand van Kesteren and his brother Herman joined the company in the 1980s and subsequently took over the helm from their father, they saw how quickly polypropylene gained in popularity as a packaging material. “We decided to expand our activities towards flex-printing, and thus managed to grow into the European number one in printed flower film and paper.”
“Printing is an important activity of our company. We take care of the entire process from design to preparing for printing, and we also take care of the stamps (polymer plates) in house,” Weinand says. “Fruit and vegetables are an important market for us, but we supply a few hundred million metres of printed film per year, to the entire food sector. Within the fresh produce sector, we’ve also seen an increase in the number of small orders, due to the rise of the many brands. That makes sense, because blank printing happened in much larger quantities. Nowadays, many parties choose full colour printing.”
Although various retailers and organisations are calling for a packaging reduction, Weinand hasn’t yet seen interest in biodegradable packaging resulting in orders. “We can supply both packaging, but we currently print zero biodegradable packaging. When we offer biodegradable packaging, it turns out to be an incredibly expensive packaging. All in all, people are talking about it a lot, but not many switches are made.”
“There’s a lot to this discussion, and each movement has its own opinions. I closely follow this discussion, and definitely don’t want to turn a blind eye to it. I recently visited the so-called packaging-free supermarket in Amsterdam, but the first thing you see is a massive tarpaulin on the door, and you practically trip over the biodegradable plastic. The main question is whether film actually degrades or if this only occurs in certain circumstances.”
VIV was a pioneer in digitally printing using a flex printer, called the ‘Smart Digital Flexo’ concept by Van Kesteren. By using a standard ink series in seven colours (CMYK plus orange, green and violet), Smart Digital Flexo (SDF) is capable of emulating about 90 per cent of all Pantone colours. That way, VIV doesn’t have to mix inks to print special colours. That doesn’t just save time, costs and materials, but also makes it possible to cleverly combine different orders within the printing order: “That’s how we strive to offer our customers quicker delivery times at better prices. And that’s very important in the fresh produce sector! It also results in a major waste reduction. That’s top of the agenda for us, and in our opinion it results in more environmental gains than so-called biodegradable packaging.”
For more information:
Weinand van Kesteren
Verpakkings Industrie Veenendaal (VIV)
Wageningselaan 98
3903 LA Veenendaal, the Netherlands
Tel: +31 (0)318 550 333
wvk@viv.nl
www.viv.nl