Plastic Tactics In the Mideast

Israeli Package Designers Keep Pace With Plastic and In-Mold Label Advances

By Leslie Gurland

Israeli manufacturers are moving to in-mold labels for injection molds on lids, curved cups, and soft-sided containers instead of pressure-sensitive or glue-applied labels.

Since the dawn of civilization, Israel has been a crossroads community, a hub for caravans plying the routes that connect Europe, Asia, and Africa. Today's ships and air freight carriers no longer have to follow those ancient paths, but Israel remains a sophisticated, multicultural center tied closely to the rest of the world. Its 6 million inhabitants as likely to hail from the great cities of Europe, North America and South Africa as from tiny Middle Eastern villages or huts in windswept Ethiopia.

From a package designer's perspective, it's a delightful challenge — a $2 billion per year packaging industry in a marketplace that has pretty much seen all the world has to offer. Meanwhile, five years of economic challenges have made consumers extremely price-conscious, pushing marketers and package designers to fight harder for shelf appeal, consumer-friendly features, and the perception of value.

But local shelves are just part of Israel's packaging picture. With its small domestic market and high industrial capacity, Israel lives on exports, which keeps Israeli manufacturers and marketers constantly competing with counterparts around the world for ideas, shelf space, and efficiency. The results are dazzling and the opportunities for package designers and manufacturers are exciting.

"I can't say, 'this is a typical Israeli look,'" says Ephri Bloch, North American manager for Tadbik in Misgav, tucked among the rocky mountains and olive groves of the Galilee region. "Israel is drawing from all over the world," Block says.

Many of the world's top consumer goods and high-tech companies have offices — and markets — in Israel. Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Danone, and others are well represented on Israeli supermarket shelves, and their products and packaging put bits of Europe and North America on display throughout the country. Big homegrown marketers such as Tnuva, Elite, and Ahava beauty products also rise to the challenge, going toe-to-toe with the world heavyweights.

The results are, in the words of Sara Katz of Adgal, a packaging and engineering consulting firm, "elaborate, colorful designs overloaded with information." Part of the challenge, and the overload, comes from the need to label most products in two or three languages used by most Israeli consumers — Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Then there are logos for an array of certifying agencies attesting to the kosher (Jewish dietary law) or halal (Islamic dietary law) provenance of thousands of products. On top of that come extensive labeling requirements on ingredients, nutritional information, and label information for pharmaceuticals that would look very familiar to North American designers.

The need for detail, coupled with the appeal of coupons and special offers designed to compete for customers in a price-driven market, have expanded the market for expanded-content labels — pressure-sensitive labels that feature peel-off coupons, accordion folds, or booklets. Flag labels, adhesive on one end and waving loose on the other, break the visual frame of the package and dangle their offers and promotions like lures towards the aisle, fishing for customers.

The need for multiple languages, dietary law certification, and nutritional information provides a challenge for Israeli designers.

The store shelves are a bright riot of information, heavy on color and metallic highlights — whether hot stamped foil, metallic inks, or varnish over foil substrates — and splayed across as much package real estate as possible. Shrink sleeves and stretch sleeves are extremely popular for their eye-appeal and their ability to spread information all over packages of nearly any shape and size. In-mold and blow-mold labels have also become extremely popular. Katz adds that high-quality Israeli bakery goods make excellent use of colorful flow-wraps.

Israel is a hotbed for high-end printing, from top-of-the-line European rotogravure and offset presses to Israel's own Indigo digital output systems. The result is an array of printing, ink, and substrate options — a virtually limitless palette for designers.

Modest vs. upscale

If there is a common denominator in consumer products packaging, says Bloch, it has to be the way marketers try to walk the balance between conveying a sense of quality as they also try not to look too upscale. "If it looks too fancy, people don't like it," Bloch explains. "Except for cosmetics. That's different."

On the grocery shelf, the emphasis in on flexible pouches and molded HDPE or PET bottles, with a bit of glass thrown into the mix for upscale products. Large packs and multiple packages shrink-sleeved together are increasingly popular, helpful in highlighting "buy one get one free" promotions and trial offers. On the pampering side, luxury items like Ahava lotions to Jade cosmetic powders make the most of metallic inks, silkscreening, the no-label look of super-clear substrates, and elegant bottles, tubes, jars and streamlined hinged cases.

The shopper's dichotomy is no surprise. Israel's economy started the decade with a double-whammy. The burst of the high-tech bubble hit the nation hard. Nearly one-third of Israel's exports are in the high-tech sector, so the shrinking industry swept away a lot of high-paying jobs in design, marketing and manufacturing. Around the same time, renewed tensions in the region shook the tourist industry to its core, shrinking the job bank even further. Israel's shoppers dug in, counted their shekels carefully, and zeroed in on value. Though both situations are improving, the market remains conservative.

Though the lion's share of Israel's packaging industry revolves around plastics, paperboard companies excel in creative solutions.

One word: plastics

Life in a small strip of desert coastline with few raw material resources has driven a decades-long quest for excellence in plastic manufacturing and converting. So while much of the world was zeroing in on the possibilities for coated paperboard stocks and glass molding, Israel focused on plastics. Export figures provide a clue at the balance. According to the Israel Export Institute, the plastics segment in packaging dwarfs all others. At $174 million in exports, plastics represented nearly four times the value of printed paper and more than 10 times the value of paperboard or glass.

"Paper raw materials are very expensive here, and glass is very expensive," explains Hanan Arad, the Israel-based packaging development manager for Unilever. "It's less of a packaging design issue and more an issue of yield, waste, logistics, price, and consumption. We can't import everything to Israel, so we became flexible."

Literally flexible. With a special eye toward polypropylene (PP), Israeli manufacturers and converters became adept at developing and managing films and laminates that served as the foundation of the flexible packaging industry. With the help of Israel's Plastics Institute and Volcani Institute, the country's plastics engineers have developed sophisticated 9- to 11-layer laminates that perform like never before. Their work also created the foundation for an array of substrates for pressure sensitive labels, shrink sleeves, and today's revolution in super-thin, oriented polypropylene in-mold labels (IML) and PP or polyethylene blow-mold labels (BML).

In-Mold Labels Create Seamless Transition In Israeli Market

Jostling for attention on the busy shelves of supermarkets and club stores, Israeli consumer goods are blossoming with the colors and razor-sharp printing of in-mold labels. In-mold labels — whether for injection molds or blow molds — free designers from the limits of screen printing on plastic cups and bottles, and from the challenges of applying pressure sensitive or glue-applied labels to dramatically curved surfaces or soft-sided containers.

Detergent bottles appear to undulate on the shelf. Ice cream tubs glow with rich color. Wet wipe boxes showcase clean, no-label lines. The secret lies in fusing an ultra-thin label to the container during the bottle molding process. In injection molding applications, a polypropylene label fuses with polypropylene; in blow molds, adhesive-backed PE or PP labels bind to HDPE or PET containers. In either process, the label and container become a single, durable, easily recyclable whole, says Micha Noah, design engineer at Tadbik Pack in Misgav, Israel.

"The in-mold label resists solvents, condensation, and damage from freezing and thawing," Noah explains. "It also ensures that the label cannot be removed from the container, which can be especially important to producers of pharmaceuticals and household products. And with all of the performance benefits, it allows us to use a state-of-the-art Goebel offset press to ensure that the labels are beautiful."

Noah adds that Tadbik has developed a peel-off in-mold label that allows designers to incorporate coupons into their labels or create durable tubs or bottles that consumers can reuse by peeling off the label and washing. And new blow-molded PET bottles are bringing new quality, clarity and eye appeal to the shelf.

Israeli plastics were also quickly drawn into the semi-rigid side of the industry, which puts PET and PP monofilm sheets and rolls to work as vacuum formed and thermoformed trays, notes Arad. The trays are a natural fit for laminate lidding materials. Israeli engineers created lid laminates for modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) and retortable packaging. Beyond their functionality, Arad says, the PET and PE lidding films are outstanding substrates for high-quality web printing — far better than the foil or rigid plastic lids they replaced — and are just one-third the cost of foil.

This soft cheese product uses Greek-style Hebrew lettering to underscore the character of the cheese.

The results are visually captivating lids that make excellent use of Israel's capacity for world-class rotogravure printing, says Arad. And complementary plastics technologies have married well in the dairy case. On Tnuva and Strauss-Elite yogurt and cheese packages, film lidding serves as a barrier, a tamper-evident seal, and a vivid printing surface, fastened to richly decorated cups bearing detailed in-mold labels. IML lids grace IML tubs in the freezer case, beckoning invitingly with spot and process color — even metallics — without the shortcomings of coated paper stock in cold, humid conditions.

IML technology also keeps pace with constant upgrades in the shapes of molded containers, notes Bloch at Tadbik, in a race for eye appeal between the dairy giants that challenges label designers and manufacturers with sensuous curves that are hard to label. Technology drives another vital aspect of the Israeli packaging industry: the need to export. Israeli products have to compete in a world market to keep the economies of scale up and expand growth opportunities. According to Dalit Yardeni of the Israel Export Institute, half of Israel's $2 billion packaging revenues this year are expected from exports, either from the sale of packaging materials to other countries or as packaging for other Israeli export goods.

Consumer-friendly features

With technology on their side, Israeli packaging companies have pushed hard on consumer-friendly features. Pouches feature reclosable zippers and clips as well as easy-opening laser scores. Microwaveable no-foil laminates make food in flexible packaging even easier for consumers to prepare and offer package designers a clear web with which to create see-through windows to show consumers the products inside. And a world of fitments has opened flexible packaging up to greater potential as single-use or reuseable containers for beverages, powders, chemicals, and cleaning products.

Tadbik developed a set of labels that serve as carry handles to match the needs of Israeli consumers, notes Bloch. In a nation where a substantial part of thepopulation walks or takes the bus to the grocery market, that's a real asset, and it serves the large-pack and multi-pack trend in the club store segment, too.

Smart, safe, and secure

Israel has also become a leader in smart packaging. Security features, from overt authenticity assurances like Latent Image Technology labels to covert taggants that require decoders to detect, have gained in popularity. Designers have begun learning how to highlight (or disguise) the features in their packages. Time-temperature indicator technologies like those from Freshpoint use thermochromatic inks to offer manufacturers a cost-effective, high-tech way to ensure that products have not been handled in conditions too hot or too cold for quality assurance. The conspicuous blue dot on the package can create a challenge for some designers, even though it is a highly visible value-added feature.

Freighters leaving the Port of Haifa on Israel's north coast ply the same waters as Phoenician traders did 3,000 years ago, when Israel was emerging as an international crossroads. Many of those freighters deposit raw materials for Israel's burgeoning plastics industry, state-of-the-art inks for the nation's top-shelf printing presses, and consumer goods from around the world. They leave loaded with Israeli products and world-class packaging. Israeli industry continues its aggressive pursuit of new technologies and higher efficiencies while Israeli consumers check the shelves for the next wave of eye-catching packaging.

Leslie Gurland is president of CLP Packaging Solutions and vice president for Logotech in Fairfield, NJ, which are both subsidiaries of Israeli companies. Leslie has spent her career representing Israeli manufacturers in the U.S., and can be reached at lgurland@clppackagingsolutions.com.