CPGs want dead-on color accuracy while also improving package the printing-process. Prepress is where it all has to happen.

Printers use the term prepress to describe what happens between the final package design and the actual package printing. In today’s demanding retail environment, its importance has increased for brand managers as they strive to succeed in package development.

Here’s why: Brand managers have to be mindful of the packaging demands of not only consumers but now the most influential retailers as well.

“We see how often the CPG companies aren’t really in control of the package at times—it’s the big retailers,” says Mark Vanover, Director of Marketing at Esko-Graphics, a supplier of pre-press solutions for printers.

By helping to set up and manage a prepress process, a brand manager can ensure that the packaging colors match what consumer focus groups liked, as well as the specifications set forth by packaging engineers and designers.

Here are three areas that brand managers should consider in maximizing the value of prepress in a packaging project:     

1. Relationship-building. Vanover says that while brand managers don’t want to become intimately involved with prepress, they should understand the process well enough to improve their product’s value and shelf appeal—and also save time and money. To that end, brand managers have begun to take a more active role in prepress.

“That means that the prepress house may not have to lower its price but rather calculate what they can do to make the package better,” says Bob Scherer, Vice President at CL&D Digital.

Brand managers who want to have an effective voice in how their package looks without becoming a “techie” should consider building collaborative relationships at the beginning of package development. The team should include packaging designers, engineers, prepress professionals, and printers.

Vanover adds this caution: “If you’re going to have collaborative effort around the world, it has to be based on industry standards.”

2. Color. A major challenge in prepress is the getting the right colors, especially custom colors.

Printers work in the traditional scheme of four ‘”process” colors—CMYK, or cyan, magenta, yellow and black—although black often can be achieved by combining the other three colors. A computer digitally “separates” a full-color image into printing plates of these three or four colors, which are applied separately in patterns of tiny dots, overlapping in ways that appear to our eyes as distinct colors across the spectrum. To achieve specific colors, or to match the designer’s specifications, printers sometimes add one or more “spot” colors, resulting in at least five- or six-color printing.

These and other color systems, which are being advanced through new technology, can significantly reduce the variety of inks a printer requires. This, in turn, reduces costs and turnaround time for a packaging project. With a small set of standard colors, printers can also use more of their press, printing a variety of products across the entire web rather than a single lane of one product, again saving significant expense.

3. Proofing. Another big challenge in prepress is getting an accurate early proof of a printed package or label. Brand managers strive for the comfort of knowing that the package design sample they see in prepress accurately represents what will wind up on the store shelf, and new technologies are coming on the market that them to achieve this objective.

“The tools now exist that you can take a design and build in color variations and provide three or four examples of that material,” says Scott Laurin, Application Specialist at Midwest Imaging and Roller Systems.

For example, a pizza marketer might want a new carton. The marketer creates the files and delivers them to a prepress shop, which can make adjustments and print a short run of cartons.

A technology called Laser Ablation Transfer (LAT) digital halftone proofing can provide color-accurate accurate proofs quickly on the actual packaging surface, using a digital workflow system.

By Brian Pelletier, Contributing Writer