“We needed to triple SKU agility without adding another press,” I told our owner in week one. Sunrise Pantry, a Singapore-based condiments brand, had grown into regional retail and export. The label line—once reliable—was now a bottleneck. Shelf launches were slipping, and rework was eating weekends.
We mapped the entire label flow: product brief to artwork to prepress to print to apply. It looked tidy on paper, messy on the floor. I kept thinking: we don’t have to print faster everywhere; we need to print smarter where it counts. That’s when we pushed for a variable-data path and started calling suppliers. Within days, we had sample packs from onlinelabels on my desk and a shortlist of Digital Printing options.
This is our 180-day story—warts and all—of moving to digital label production for multi-SKU, short-run work while keeping an eye on food safety, color control, and cost per label. No silver bullets. Just what worked for us, what didn’t, and what we’d repeat.
Company Overview and Operating Reality
Sunrise Pantry is a mid-sized food company in Southeast Asia. We produce sauces and dressings for supermarkets and e-commerce, with roughly 60-80 active SKUs at any given time. Runs swing wildly: a few thousand labels for new flavors, then 50,000 for core items. That mix punished our legacy setup. Flexographic Printing handled long-run core SKUs fine; short, seasonal runs were clogging everything else.
Our production environment runs two shifts, five to six days a week, sharing operators across packing and labeling. The label line historically relied on pre-printed rolls and simple thermal overprints for dates. As assortments expanded, changeovers piled up. We needed a Short-Run, Variable Data approach without hammering FPY% or color ΔE. That’s the tension we carried into this project.
From a compliance standpoint, we sell domestically and export. For U.S. shipments, regulatory text and nutrition panels had to track rule updates; keeping variants straight was manual and fragile. We were overdue for a smarter way to manage data on press.
Where Things Broke: Quality, Throughput, and Compliance Pressures
Our pain points fell into three buckets. First, quality: color drift across substrates and lots left us with ΔE swings that buyers started noticing. On some weeks, rejects hovered around 7–9% due to color mismatch or mis-registration. Second, throughput: changeovers chewed 25–35 minutes per SKU, stacking delays across the week. Third, compliance: export labels needed to reflect evolving rules, including the fda proposed nutrition labels formatting, and our manual checks weren’t catching minor text changes cleanly.
We ran a one-week audit and learned a simple truth: our process favored long, stable runs. The world had moved on; we were still treating every label like a big batch. Digital Printing promised to flip that logic—especially for short SKUs and promotional runs—without wrecking our cost model. But there was a catch: we’d need better data discipline, and operators would need to trust the workflow.
Finally, we had a packaging angle: a new line of transparent dressings called for clear printable labels on PET bottles. Our existing materials and inks weren’t delivering the clarity and adhesion we wanted on those containers. So material selection became a second project within the project.
Why We Chose Digital Printing and Food-Safe, Low-Migration Inks
We narrowed the decision to Digital Printing with UV-LED Ink, using Food-Safe, Low-Migration Ink sets on labelstock for food contact safety (indirect). For clear products, we tested PET film labelstock and a dedicated adhesive tuned for PET bottles. Die-Cutting and Lamination stayed in-line for simplicity. The plan: Flexographic Printing for Long-Run staples; Digital Printing for Short-Run, Variable Data SKUs and seasonal items. Hybrid Printing was tempting, but complexity outstripped our crew’s capacity.
Substrate tests covered paper labelstock and PET film. On bottles, the PET film won; no milky edges, good clarity, and consistent laydown. That addressed the clear printable labels requirement for marketing. On inks, we specified Low-Migration Ink sets and set documentation to cover FDA 21 CFR references for indirect food contact. We also scoped for EU 1935/2004 to keep future options open. Not perfect coverage for every market, but a solid base for Asia with export flexibility.
Pilot, Samples, and the First 1,000 Rolls
The turning point came when we ran a structured pilot. We started with five SKUs—two core, three seasonal—and ordered materials from multiple vendors. The team chose onlinelabels’ sample packs to speed early trials; having several labelstock options in hand saved a week. We even bookmarked onlinelabels. in our spec folder so operators could pull up material sheets without chasing PDFs.
We kicked off with 10–12 art versions to stress variable data, including QR codes (GS1/ISO/IEC 18004) and batch/date fields. Prepress built templates with color bars for ΔE checks and set a target of ΔE 2–3 on brand colors. Operators ran daytime validation to simplify troubleshooting. For regulatory lines, we slotted in a new nutrition panel layout aligned with the fda proposed nutrition labels approach so our U.S. shipments matched the intended direction.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The first 1,000 rolls produced had a defect rate of 2–4%—better, but not instant magic. Our biggest win was operator confidence. Once they saw the consistency on PET film and the cleanliness of the Low-Migration Ink on test swabs, buy-in grew. We also tested a small batch of onlinelabels samples on the clear SKUs; adhesion and clarity held through cold-chain trials, which was a relief.
What the Numbers Say After Six Months
Fast forward six months. Across short-run and seasonal jobs, FPY% moved from the low-80s into the 90–93% range. Changeover time dropped by about 10–15 minutes per SKU on the digital line. Waste on variable data jobs fell by 15–20%, mainly due to fewer make-ready pulls and cleaner registration. Color Accuracy stabilized with ΔE commonly 2–3 on critical brand tones. Throughput on short-run work went up by roughly 12–18% once the crew settled into the routine.
On compliance, a templated panel for the fda proposed nutrition labels saved prepress hours—about 20–30% fewer file touches per update cycle. The financials look reasonable: with volume assumptions we’re seeing, the payback period for the digital unit sits in the 14–18 month band. I’ll be honest: savings aren’t uniform. Very small jobs still carry a higher cost per label; large, steady SKUs remain on flexo where unit economics hold. That’s the balance we chose.
Lessons We’re Still Applying (and a Quick Q&A)
What worked well: a split-run strategy—Flexographic Printing for long, stable SKUs and Digital Printing for Short-Run, Variable Data work. Training operators early on the workflow paid off; we ran two workshops focused on data discipline and print checks. We also set quality gates: color bars on every roll, spot checks each start-up, and a simple ΔE dashboard. Where we’re still tuning: PET film handling in humid weeks, and lamination pressure to limit micro-bubbles on curved bottles.
What I’d change: start with a smaller pilot set. We picked too many SKUs at once and lost a week to chasing issues that only appeared on one variant. Also, I’d lock the data template earlier; small text differences forced late-night art edits. None of this sinks the model, but it’s where real time goes.
Quick Q&A—someone on our team asked, “how to mail merge from excel to word labels?” For us, variable data runs through prepress templates, but the principle is similar: clean your Excel sheet, standardize headers, and map fields to the template. We used a lightweight script to validate characters and prevent the odd encoding issue. In onboarding, we included a short training on “how to mail merge from excel to word labels” as a mental model for how variable fields populate—helped operators visualize what the press would print.
