Journal Packaging
Go to the print run
The most useful hour of a packaging job happens at six in the morning, next to a press.
Aiko has been at every print run we have had since 2020. It is not a ritual. A tin printed in four colours on a metal press behaves nothing like the file on a screen, and the only place to find out how is next to the machine.
On the first Moro run the olive green came out nearly black on the lacquered tin. On screen it had been fine; in the proof it had been fine. At six in the morning in Oinofyta, with the press running, it was wrong, and it took forty minutes and a lighter ink to put it right. If we had not been there, ten thousand tins would have gone to the mill looking like motor oil.
What we check
Colour against the approved proof, under daylight and under supermarket light. Registration on the smallest text. How the lacquer changes the darks. Whether the barcode scans from the shelf edge, with a real scanner we bring along.
It is in the price of every packaging job, and the printers have stopped asking why we come.