The partnership between La Prensa Etichette and DuPont is very recent, but in just a few months it has already yielded excellent results, so much so that in the business plan of the Italian leader in mineral water labels there is room for adding new technologies, starting with prepress, but not only. We discuss this in this article with the main players of this partnership, Emanuele Delfino Ceo of La Prensa Etichette, Mario Castelli and Riccardo Labianca of DuPont
Dividing companies between those that invest in innovation and technology and those that instead make price leverage the only competitive weapon to survive in the market, he has always been in the label printing and finishing business, mainly in the mineral water, soft-drink and FMCG sectors, but especially recently, driven by that persistent optimism, which despite everything, must be kept alive in entrepreneurs of the likes of him he has launched his company on a growth and development that now seems unstoppable. We are talking about Emanuele Delfino, Ceo of La Prensa Etichette, 180 employees and undisputed promoter in recent years of important acquisitions of companies in the printing and converting of packaging and labels. A story that began like many others in the basement of a building, carried on thanks to the hard work of an entire family and always, by choice, in wet glue label printing.
“My father and uncle who founded the company in 1966 have always been dedicated to paper label printing and even when the self-adhesive film came on the market, they chose not to follow that route. I don’t know if that was a far-sighted choice, but in any case, it allowed us to become a reference point for mineral water labels and beverages in general,” Emanuele Delfino tells us at company’s headquarters in San Giuliano Milanese.
2012 has been a watershed year approaching the flexible packaging market and now the In-Mould labeling
By the time Delfino took the lead of the company, it was already time to make important decisions and so to get ahead of all those customers who were abandoning paper-and-glue labels for plastic ones, particularly in propylene, he decided to equip the pressroom with a wide-web flexographic printing machine from Fischer&Krecke now BOBST, followed closely by a Windmöller&Hölscher and another BOBST.
Entering the wide-web flexible packaging sector was definitely a winning choice as it has allowed La Prensa to be able to continue supplying its historical clients in the beverage sector, also becoming a point of reference for all the polypropylene bands that today make up the packaging and labels of many of the beverages we find in large-scale retail trade.
However, in 2016, aware of the risky choice made in the 1970s not to follow the “adhesive” world, La Prensa acquired an adhesive label and sleeve company, Summit Press srl of Gallarate, to begin, again a growth path which ended up today with the installation of three 2-8-10 color printing machines.
The company implemented investments in technology on one side and strategic acquisitions on the other, also thanks in part to the joining in La Prensa at the beginning of 2024 of Unigrains Italia and BNP Paribas BNL Equity Investments a French investment fund, specialized in the growth and development of SMEs.
“The path taken in the last period gave me back that energy boost that in an entrepreneur should never be lacking and which is always needed to look at the future with the wish to innovate and propose something new to the market,” Delfino continues, emphasizing, however, that despite the various acquisitions successfully completed, the human relationship with customers and suppliers will always underlie everything. For this reason, each company acquired is not overturned at management level; on the contrary, each previous owner is involved in the management of his or her own company, although incorporated in La Prensa Group. The announcement of the acquisition of Grafiche Lama based in Piacenza, a company specialized in In Mould labels with about 30 employees and a rapidly expanding market, is very recent.
Sustainable flexo plate production with the new DuPont™ Cyrel® FAST 2000 TD
La Prensa operates in both offset and flexo printing and its greatest strength lies in integrating the complete production steps in-house, making the printing plates for both processes in-house, managed by a single department with specialized graphic designers. The goal is to manage the flow with time and cost control so that maximum efficiency can be achieved, guaranteeing quality that is now no longer a point of discussion in the customer relationship. For this reason, La Prensa decided to be ahead of its time by upgrading their flexo plate technology and after their visit to the DuPont booth at last drupa to see the latest news, last September in two working days the flexo plate department saw the startup of the new Cyrel® FAST2000 TD, the technology for thermal plate processing.
“We chose the best technology and materials available on the market. An investment that also included the Esko XPS exposure unit as well as the new Cyrel® FAST 2000 TD plus. light finisher and after just a few months we can already be extremely satisfied of the choice we made,” adds Emanuele Delfino. Our latest investment helps reduce the energy consumption and consequently the CO2 impact of the company’s production process.
The new DuPont FAST system and plates used by La Prensa every day now are highly appreciated both by prepress operators who now work in an extremely clean, odor-free environment with a production capacity more than doubled compared to the previous water-based technology and by press operators who are able to achieve better quality, consistency, with extremely short makeready time. “My team reported that they noticed a significant improvement in the definition of the screens, in the ink transfer, allowing a machine makeready with very low waste, going fast into production. In addition, compared to the previous water-based technology, which required frequent processor brush replacements in order to keep them efficient, with results that were not entirely satisfactory, we have eliminated downtime for weekly maintenance , but above all we no longer have to dispose of all the production waste, polluted water as special waste, that we used to storage in the prepress department and that created a whole series of problems such as working place cleaning, bad odors and costs. With Cyrel® FAST, the operators work in a much healthier environment than before and this is a core value for us,” Delfino says again.
DuPont: a complete system for all flexo needs
DuPont has invested a lot in R&D on FAST thermal technology and in parallel there has also been a significant effort to offer the market the right plate for every specific application. “Today DuPont has a wide portfolio of thermal flexo plates and for all applications, giving maximum freedom of choice to the customer,” adds Riccardo Labianca.
“We are proud to have been able to establish such a partnership in a short time with La Prensa Etichette. We have known them for years and we have always discussed several projects with them, starting always from a technical point of view,” Mario Castelli from DuPont reports us -” Today we have a proposal that from technology to consumables can cover all flexo printing needs, with excellent quality results, as our customers report us. With La Prensa we carried out some tests with our plates that demonstrated results far beyond their needs and our expectations. I remember that one of the tests was to stop the machine for about 2 hours with the plates mounted. The purpose of the test was to see how they would behave when restarted. The result was extraordinary, without any waste,” Mario Castelli concludes, confirming that the partnership with La Prensa is only at the beginning, given the Group’s intention to grow further through new acquisitions and then replicating in each plant the business and technological models which have been already successfully tested.
