Excel Labels and Ultrachem enter exclusive supplier partnership for water-based flexo inks

Excel Labels converts a variety of paper and synthetic labels and tags for companies in the retail and industrial sectors. Its high-volume production facility operates with an ethos geared to rapid turnarounds.

Working to meet the increasingly demanding needs of its customers required Excel Labels to find inks that would perform within this fast-paced production environment. Ultrachem’s water-based flexo ink is being used across Excel Labels’ entire machinery portfolio that numbers seven 10-13in presses, running alongside the company's digital and high capacity plain label converting lines. 

Jon Roberts, operations manager at Excel Labels, explained one of the reasons the company prefers dealing with Ultrachem is because of its knowledge regarding ink formulation, as well as its ongoing desire to understand Excel Labels’ business requirements.

‘A big positive for us when using Ultrachem’s water based-flexo ink is that it is a very stable product which, whilst fast drying, doesn’t dry on the plate. We can now run our presses at higher production speeds than we achieved prior to using Ultrachem inks.’

In addition, as a high proportion of Excel Labels’ production volume is with direct thermal papers, it found the formulation of Ultrachem’s water-based flexo inks performed extremely well when printing on to both coated and uncoated thermal substrates. The company was impressed with both the ease of printability of the inks and in particular their printability on thermal substrates, visibly reducing previous mottling issues.

Ultrachem is a UK-based manufacturer of inks, pre-press and pressroom consumables.