A slice of Smurfit Kappa: UK site equips Papa John’s with award-winning Call of Duty pizza boxes

01 Jun 2022 --- In 2020, Smurfit Kappa and Papa John’s entered a partnership to provide the pizza giant with exclusive pizza packaging for its limited-time offer, in collaboration with video game Call Of Duty. This packaging project went on to win Gold at the FIA Awards 2021 in the “corrugated post print uncoated process” category.

This wasn’t the only time Smurfit Kappa’s Yate, UK, corrugated packaging facility team worked on award-winning solutions for Papa John’s, as another recent, limited-time packaging creation for a Godzilla vs Kong collaboration won Silver at the same awards. 

Smurfit Kappa says the “unique” Papa John’s project posed some intricate print and artwork challenges that it was able to overcome in the award-winning pizza box packaging.

The Yate location has been a supplier of Papa John’s for more than ten years, and its supplier for pizza boxes since August 2019. Its team produces more than 35 million pizza boxes for the brand every year. 

Papa John’s works with limited-time offers throughout the year, collaborating with gaming, film, and charity partners around the globe. In 2020, Papa John’s partnered with the launch of Call Of Duty: Cold War. 

Untagged artwork challenges
Smurfit Kappa Yate says its client Papa John’s wanted pizza boxes with special imagery to make a lasting impression on its customers. Its aim was to create pizza boxes which differentiated and disrupted the marketplace.

The key challenge with the brief provided from Papa John’s and Cygnus, their creative agency, was with the reprographics. Artwork for the Call Of Duty collaboration was supplied as untagged CMYK, which brings a unique set of challenges, highlights Smurfit Kappa Yate.

Smurfit Kappa Yate says its client Papa John’s wanted pizza boxes with special imagery to make a lasting impression on its customers.When artwork is untagged, there is no color profile or target on how the imagery should appear. Printing onto an uncoated board for pizza boxes will always deliver a different result than printing onto coated bright white paper, explains the company.

The CMYK artwork provided did not take into account the total ink coverage limits of a pre-print flexo process, which is 260%, meaning the team had to re-separate the artwork to reduce ink coverage to a usable limit. 

Single spot color
Also, the artwork did not allow for the mis-register movement of a flexo process, which could have left the text on the design unreadable. The creative agency worked hard to create the “striking imagery” for these pizza boxes, but the artwork files left Smurfit Kappa Yate with many challenges to overcome.

Smurfit Kappa Yate says its team was able to overcome many of these reprographic challenges by working closely with the external supplier converting the supplied CMYK artwork to spot colors. 

With this approach, large areas of color were created from single spot colors. This eliminated the total ink coverage problems, and the issues with mis-registering. The design team then worked to manually retouch the images so elements such as text and details would appear correctly.

Boosting brand retention
Papa John’s senior director of marketing, Giles Codd, comments: “We have been working with Smurfit Kappa for more than ten years, and once again they have produced incredible pizza box packaging for our latest limited-time offer. This collaboration with Call Of Duty: Cold War is one of our most successful yet, and we are over the moon to have boxes which leave a lasting impression on our customers.”

Smurfit Kappa Yate site’s key account director, Lee Gammon, says: “Our client had high demands for this project, and we were confident we could meet their high expectations and overcome the challenges.”

Dave Whittle, print manager, adds: “The detailed imagery and artwork for this project was a huge roadblock for our print team. We had to think outside the box and come up with a solution to deliver packaging which was striking and bold.”

Jamie Rayner, Cygnus creative director, concludes: “It’s great working with a print partner that doesn’t use the phrase ‘we can't do that.’ As a creative agency that likes to push the boundaries with every project we work on, we knew we were asking a lot from Smurfit with our Call of Duty designs. The outcome was a pizza box more complex in print than many you’ll see, and something we’re all really proud of.”

Edited

By Natalie Schwertheim