The trick is there, but you can’t see it. One of the many side effects of theinflation. While on the one hand the increase in the cost of food products recorded in the last year is visible to anyone who does the shopping, so much so that the increase recorded by Istat for this type of goods was even higher than the already record recorded from the general rate of inflation (+12% on an annual basis in January 2023 for foodstuffs against +10% for the general index), on the other there are repercussions that are decidedly less noticeable.
Among these is the boom in the overprinting of the prices indicated by companies on food packaging. A phenomenon that increases every time some major upheaval occurs in the world, from the Covid pandemic to the war in Ukraine. And which, in this round, is mostly linked to the race that has brought Italy back to inflation levels not seen since the 1980s.
Price pressure
“From Covid onwards there was a crescendo, so much so that in mid-2022 we reached +40% of activity compared to the previous year“, he confirms Giovanni Luca Arici, administrative director of Rotoprint, a Milanese company born 45 years ago in Lainate and undisputed world leader in a niche addressed by multinational groups, but also small and medium-sized companies. “At this stage we are receiving many requests, especially from the dairy world, evidently one of the most affected by the upward trend in prices. For example, a well-known company asked us to overprint the price of milk indicated on the packaging on 3 million pieces”.
Not only. Among the larger requests received in the last period there are also those of a group that produces high quality cheeses for the modification of the prices of the crescenza and those of another company which, instead of increasing the price to the public, has preferred to reduce the weight of the pecorino sold already packaged. A series of interventions for which overprinting guarantees considerable advantages.
Emergency interventions
The system created and patented by Rotoprint allows, in fact. companies to fully recover, rather than shredding, unusable packaging leftovers due to label updates, inaccuracies, errors or market changes. But in addition to the savings guaranteed by the reuse of materials, overprinting has the advantage of making packaging available much faster than it would be necessary to reorder it from scratch. All the more so in a historical moment like this, in which supply chains often work slowly.
“We call ourselves the Packaging Emergency Department”, jokes Arici, “because in some cases we find ourselves having to modify the materials that companies supply us in 24 hours. Ours, in fact, is a job that varies from case to case and which responds to small and large emergencies that companies find themselves managing with sometimes only a few hours’ notice”.
The ingredients also change
In addition to changing prices, the requests concern the cancellation of a promotion from the packs once the promotional period has ended, the correction of printing errors, the change of the barcode, the insertion of a legal statement that had been forgotten and the lack of which would end up blocking the marketing of the product and the modification of an ingredient.
No surprise, therefore, that in 45 years of activity more than 2,500 companies have turned to Rotoprint, whose activity has saved over one million kilometers of materials from pulping. In fact, a quantity that is equivalent to the distance traveled 25 times around the world.
