Belgium’s leading beverages company Brouwerij Martens has produced bottles for the Fifa World Cup 2018 with design flexibility using technology provided by KHS, a pioneer in filling and packaging solutions. Brouwerij Martens is offering its premium beer in 32 country-specific bottle designs in the French market. Various images of the participating nations have been printed straight onto the PET bottles using Direct Print Powered by KHS. Direct Print Powered by KHS offers beverage producers great flexibility of design, thus giving them a competitive edge. The Martens brewery in Belgium is now making good use of this innovative technology and together with a French supermarket chain is placing specially designed bottles on the shelves for the soccer World Cup.
Back in 2015, the Belgian brewery was the very first beverage producer to launch directly printed bottles to market produced with the prototype of the Direct Print Powered by KHS system. The successor Pilot 1.0 version of Direct Print Powered by KHS, which includes many new features, is now being used on the Martens production line. Pilot 1.0 incorporates technological additions which permit an even better quality of print at high speeds and enable each individual bottle to be printed with different motifs within a very short space of time. The customer is able to decide whether the individual designs are printed onto the bottles consecutively or at random. An additionally developed printed image inspection system ensures the standard of quality at industrial performance level.
The bottles produced using the digital printing process are also 100% recyclable. This was again confirmed last year by the European PET Bottle Platform (EPBP) renewing the certificate granted to the process. PET bottles processed by Direct Print Powered by KHS have no negative impact on the rPET and are thus officially approved for bottle-to-bottle PET recycling.
