Chesapeake Partners with Leading Color Specialist to Develop New Color Management System

Chesapeake has now digitised all the colours it uses, allowing it to produce a digital proof that accurately represents how the colour will be reproduced on press.

Mar 7 2012 --- Chesapeake, a leading global supplier of consumer packaging, has worked in partnership with the leading colour specialists X-Rite, Pantone, Esko and Sun Chemical, to develop a new colour management system that will revolutionise the way colour is reproduced.

Over the past 18 months, Chesapeake has worked with Pantone and Sun Branding Solutions to develop a system that can accurately control brand colours throughout the supply chain, across mediums and geographies. The new process, PantoneLIVE, will ensure a brand’s colours are consistent and the improvement in colour control is both measurable and dramatic. The benefits to both a printer and brand owner are obvious as any inconsistency in colour can provide an opportunity for counterfeiters.

Studies have shown that colour is the main criteria that a consumer uses to identify and select a particular brand. “For pharmaceuticals, even the slightest variation in a pack’s colour could make the product suspect.” said, Jon Drennan, operations director at Chesapeake’s Leicester facility. “Our goal was to create a digital palette of all the ink colours we use in printing. We wanted to build a set of data that would represent a given colour and use that data to recreate the colour exactly the same every time, regardless of substrate.”

Chesapeake has now digitised all the colours it uses, allowing it to produce a digital proof that accurately represents how the colour will be reproduced on press. These digital proofs allow a design to be visualised with a customer, which speeds up the overall approval process. “The job of a printer is to deliver a printed product that represents what the designer created and what the brand owner expects across a range of different printed mediums,” says Drennan. “Digitising the colour palette takes any subjectivity out of the printing process.”

One of the benefits of using PantoneLIVE has been a significant reduction in the businesses’ ink inventory. Chesapeake Leicester, for example, once stocked as many as 3,000 different ink types, which have now been reduced to just over 500 – without reducing colour choice. Drennan went on to say, “Moving to a digitised palette, instead of the analog format, will allow us to massively reduce the number of inks we hold across the business. We expect to reduce our ink inventory by some 60% once this process is complete.”

PantoneLIVE will allow brand owners and printers to manage and maintain their colour assets. Digitising the colour palette will allow colour assets to be shared and communicated accurately. Colours that are true to the brand are tougher to copy and provide reassurance for consumers. Every year, the number of counterfeit goods continues to increase, particularly affecting high value luxury items and pharmaceutical products. Mike Cheetham, Chesapeake’s CEO, summarises, “With counterfeiting on the rise, it’s more important for brands to safeguard product integrity and assure consumer confidence. It is essential that a pack’s colour is both accurate and consistent. Together with other anti-counterfeiting techniques, PantoneLIVE will help to combat an increasingly sophisticated global threat.”