Boxes That Shine

Pacific Southwest Container Achieves Metallic Textures With New Printing Techniques

By Deborah Toth

The "star" package for Ghirardelli is printed on metallized poly stock.

The California town of Modesto is situated in perhaps one of the richest agricultural areas of the nation, producing nuts, fruits, and wine grapes. To its west, in nearby Sunnyvale and San Francisco, are the homes of some of the best-known brands and fastest-growing firms in the world, such as Apple Computer and Ghirardelli Chocolate. Providing the product packaging for these well-known brands is Pacific Southwest Container (PSC), which not only produces a reliable transporter for these products but manufactures safe, colorful, and eye-catching containers with high-impact graphics to capture a customers' attention and sell the product off of the shelf.

"We are the West Coast's premier provider of packaging solutions producing a broad array of containers and point-of-purchase displays for the consumer, electrical, food, and wine markets that are reflective of the California economy," says Darin Jones, senior vice president of PSC. "We've been growing consistently for the past five years, posting a 17% growth rate last year with record sales of $104 million, and 19% growth this year up to this point."

Founded in Modesto in 1973 as a small, family-owned business, PSC has grown to encompass a 500,000 sq. ft. location in Modesto and a 215,000 sq. ft. facility at its satellite operation in Visalia, CA, with its unique ability to provide a comprehensive array of in-house services, including planning and design, manufacturing, and delivery of innovative product packaging solutions.

Apple was very particular about the brushed metal look on this OS X box, which has printing over foil stamping.

PSC maintains a team of five in-house structural engineers to help its clients with package design and cost as well as marketing appeal. Part of the team is a folding carton guru, another has a masters degree from CalPoly who focuses on testing substrates, while another is a foam expert who helps to design protective packaging for electronic instrumentation and other delicate products.

"We lend our expertise, suggest material types, styles, and cost savings," says Tony Joyce, PSC's design team leader. "Our clients are changing their packages more often and ordering shorter run lengths for those packages. The life-cycle of packages is shorter. We design packages to accommodate our customers' needs but also to provide a 'wow' factor. We have to be on top of our game to help them be on top of their game."

Tapping new wine territories

One of PSC's greatest appeals is to be able to partner with its clients on new projects and help to deliver an innovative yet cost-effective package. For example, a growing trend in the wine market is bag-in-a-box. Bag-in-a-box consists of a rectangular box with a triple-layer clear-plastic airtight bag inside that holds the wine. To pour the wine, a hole is punched in the bottom end of the box and a plastic dripless spout is pulled out. Originally introduced for downscale, sweet blush wines, bag-in-a-box is moving into the better quality wines, such as chardonnay, merlot, and cabernet sauvignon. Today, about one in every five glasses of wine consumed in the U.S. comes from a box.

Pacific Southwest Container is strategically located to take advantage of the new bag-in-a-box trend that is now entering premium wine brands.

PSC has become one of the major suppliers of boxes for bag-in-box wines, producing boxes for Gallo, Canandaigua, and The Wine Group. "We are constantly making an effort to make the box more user-friendly and to work with wineries to increase the impact of the graphics," says Blair Bergman, team leader of the press department at PSC. "Suppliers and producers see the box as an opportunity to add more graphics and information, turning the entire box into a point-of-sale item. We also need to work in tandem with the client and our structural designers and to be conscious of what they needed and how it should work."

One of PSC's customers is Sonoma Hill Winery which sells the super premium brand Blackburn Fine Wine Cache in a three-liter cask. To maintain the wine's super premium identity, PSC produces the Blackburn carton with a burnished-gold foil exterior. A single-face laminate is used on the box with 18-point metallized polyester board. PSC overprints the silver metallization with yellow ink to create a glossy gold metallic appearance. Once the four-color sheetfed printing is complete, PSC embosses the laminate with vertical pinstripes. Embossing is also used behind the oversize "B" logo to make it stand out from the box by printing with white ink and then overprinting with PMS yellow ink.

One of PSC's in-house structural engineers is a foam expert who designs protective packaging for electronic equipment.

PSC has partnered with other well-known brands headquartered in California. Apple Computer, located in nearby Sunnyvale, receives regular visits from PSC to talk to their design team and project managers and discuss new techniques available from PSC. One project produced by PSC was the Macintosh OS X folding carton, which required four color process plus match gray, matte aqueous, satin silver foil produced on .018 SBS.

"Apple had a particular look for the OS X box," recalls Brian Wecht, PSC prepress team leader. "They were very particular about the brushed metal on the 'X' and how it would look. We produced it by foil stamping it first then printing on top to achieve that look. We had to do two press tests for them before they approved it."

Superior food rating for packaging

Another large client is Ghirardelli Chocolate, headquartered in San Francisco. The challenge on these packages, says Wecht, is printing on metallized poly stock. For its Ghirardelli Star, the company required printing on .018 metallized poly, using four-color process plus three match colors and gloss aqueous.

"Ghirardelli is one of our more demanding customers, but very creative," says Joyce. "We do a variety of work for them, from corrugated boxes for their shipping needs to pallet displays and promotional boxes. Since their product changes often according to national sales demographics and the seasons, Ghirardelli asks us to manufacture short-run jobs for them."

El Monterey Mexican Grill, headquartered in Dinuba, CA, in the San Joaquin Valley, turns to neighbor PSC to produce its high-end food packaging. Many of the jobs require six-color hexachrome and aqueous coating produced on .014 SBS. PSC, says Wecht, is one of the few printers equipped with a 50" seven-color press to produce the hexachrome and metallic gold all in one pass.

"We've had several customers, like El Monterey, who have requested that we use six-color hexachrome to enhance the food on the packaging to make it look as fresh and appealing as possible, to match the real food on the inside of the package," says Jones.

A key advantage offered by PSC to food packaging customers is its superior rating given to PSC by the American Institute of Baking, an independent auditor that inspects PSC's premises once a year to make sure that its manufacturing process is in compliance with government regulations for food safety. All of its inks, substrates, and manufacturing processes are checked for compliance.

New worlds of printing

To maintain the high quality, speed, and flexibility needed to produce these packages, PSC has made substantial investments in the latest litho and flexo printing technologies in the past four years. On the litho side, PSC has installed a stable of KBA Rapida sheetfed presses with one more on order. Two 64" six-color UV interdeck Rapida presses, a 50" seven-color press with tower coater, and a 41" nine-color UV interdeck press with a unique first-unit flexo unit followed by a curing station, with another six-color 64" sheetfed press to be installed this fall.

PSC's environmentally controlled press rooms and sophisticated color monitoring systems, along with automatic delivery systems of water and chemicals, gives PSC the ability to control the quality and consistency of its processes. Special coatings, either UV or aqueous, allow its customers to create vivid, eye-catching packages.

PSC's flexo printing capabilities include one- to six-color work in a single pass. Motorized interchangeable print modules allow for almost instantaneous setup. Superior inline printing, rotary die cutting, folding and gluing are due to a sophisticated vacuum transfer system and interdeck infrared drying.

Recently, PSC introduced a new innovation in the world of printing: Meta-tech printing for Meta-chrome and Meta-pearl. Meta-tech printing is a new technology that produces foil-like effects using specially formulated inks, resulting in an overall metallic appearance. PSC can integrate meta-tech qualities in various concentrations with four-color process or match colors to create a variety of effects.

"We're gradually gaining more and more customers who are using Meta-chrome and Meta-pearl," says Wecht. "Not every project requires this type of look, but we're finding that it is being used readily on video game and software packaging. It's easy, cost effective, and more flexible than foil stamping; Meta-tech can simulate the metallic qualities of foils simply by laying ink on paper. It is being used to create a whole new dimension for printed images for subjects that are metallic, like automobiles or jewelry, or for reproducing black and white photography with a liquid silver effect."

In its 30+ years, Pacific Southwest Container (PSC) has carved a significant niche in the packaging field due to its ability to provide a comprehensive array of services in-house—from planning and design to manufacturing and delivery. This allows the firm to provide its customers with the most creative and cost-effective solutions to meet their packaging needs.

"Our fast growth is due to a number of factors," says Jones. "But primarily, we've grown consistently because we've become more efficient in our manufacturing process, we've been able to reduce the number of vendors for our customers because we offer more services under our own roof, and we've been able to speedily deliver their product to market with unique but sensible packages using more colors, more complex coatings, and more vibrant designs."