Back issues

Can milk drive food processing and packaging in India? - In a statement made to the Lok Sabha in end-November 2009, KV Thomas the Minister of State for Agriculture said that milk production in the country is planned to be raised to 180 million tonnes by the 2021-22 financial year. This would not mean any great increase from the annual growth rate of 3.9% in the past decade. Nonetheless, the National Dairy Plan of the government drawn up by the National Dairy Development Board has an outlay of Rs 17,371 crore over the next fifteen years to increase the productivity of this sector.

Printpack 2013 - The Printpack 2013 exhibition has faced and surmounted several challenges. It has been organized in a relatively short time for a major exhibition, just eight months and it has moved to a new site which is outside the city of Delhi although connected with by an eight lane expressway. The Greater Noida Expo Centre is a modern exhibition and convention centre and many major shows have already moved there including the Indian Autoexpo 2014.

Rotogravure versus wide web CI flexography — Notwithstanding the increased interest in flexography in India, rotogravure remains the dominant and faster grow- ing technology for flexible packaging. In one of the fastest growing economies in the world, flexo is dominant in seg- ments such as narrow web label presses, stack flexo press- es, corrugated presses. It is finding new uses such as print- ing on woven and non-woven materials. Narrow web presses are increasingly looked at for printing on unsup- ported films and for lamitubes. There is even a beginning in the use of narrow web flexo presses for producing mono- cartons.

The future is corrugated — Sculpture and architecture in packaging
Nowadays just as graphic designers speak less and less about typography, packaging designers rarely speak about structural issues. The design talk normally ranges from ‘the first moment of truth’ to issues of brand integrity and brand protection.

Consumer demand boosts top packaging labels
Unilever CEO Paul Polman said at a Bengaluru press conference this month that the company will generate threequarters of its revenue from developing markets such as India and China by 2020 — almost 20% higher than today. Unilever labels like Kissan, Knorr, Annapurna, Tajmahal, Bru, Lux, Rin, Ponds, Lakme, Close Up and Sun Silk that have straddled the urban Indian retail marts for decades are now moving to the smaller towns and rural interiors which have become the fastest growing areas for its Indian arm Hindustan Unilever. As per a Nielsen report released last week India’s poorest households with income below Rs 72,000 annually will add US$ 3 billion (around Rs 16,710 crore) to the sales of the consumer packaged goods industry by 2015.