Digital packaging printing: What has happened since drupa 2024?

One of the key predictions at drupa 2024 was that the use of digital printing for short-run personalised packaging would increase. This trend has been confirmed over the past year. Brand owners, particularly in the food and beverage sector, are using digital printing to produce short-run and region-specific packaging to increase customer loyalty and respond more quickly to market changes. In addition, the advances in digital printing technology unveiled at drupa 2024 have made it possible to economically produce runs of more than 1,500 copies. This development has broadened the scope of digital printing, allowing greater flexibility and efficiency in meeting different market demands.

While smaller brands in particular have already embraced digital printing, many big brands are still reluctant to use the technology on a large scale. At drupa 2024, it was expected that major brands would soon be using digital printing on a large scale for versioning and seasonal packaging. In the past year, a number of major brands have also launched pilot projects, but widespread adoption is still a long way off.

It seems that multi-stakeholder decision making in large brand organisations is still slowing down implementation. Purchasing, development, creative, legal and sustainability all have different requirements and risk tolerances, and it is still difficult to align these functions in large organisations. This is why converters need to continue to invest time in educating their brand clients not only on the technical capabilities of digital, but also on its operational and strategic benefits.

Although digital packaging printing is playing an increasingly important role, it is still largely a complement to existing systems rather than a replacement. For high-volume applications in particular, the cost-effectiveness of ‘old’ technology – coupled with an infrastructure that has been in place for decades – is still hard to beat. The optimism of last year and the view that all market players are 'hungry for new ideas' has partly come true. The curiosity is there, but risk aversion remains an important limiting factor, and is likely to have increased given the challenging macroeconomic outlook.

In this sense, the predictions and hopes of drupa 2024 were neither exaggerated nor premature. But they were clearly based on an optimism that underestimated the complexity of the change. What we are experiencing today is not a digital revolution, but a continuous evolution. Technology is becoming more sophisticated and business applications more strategic. The biggest change is not technological, but cultural: More and more stakeholders understand why digital is important, even if they don't yet understand how it works. With drupa 2028 on the horizon, the next few years are likely to be defined by how well vendors manage to build partnerships, provide end-to-end support and reduce innovation risks for their brand customers.