Mexican Beer Labels Knocks ’em Dead
The visual impact of a label can exert great influence over consumers and trade customers alike. That certainly has been true for Day of the Dead craft beer, which uses small-scale reproductions of specially commissioned acrylic paintings to brighten its labels and multipack carriers. The beers are sold at retail and in a growing number of restaurants.
There are six beers in the product line — Pale Ale, Blonde Ale, Hefeweizen, Amber Ale, Porter and IPA — and the label artwork for each reflects the beer’s name. The “Hop on or Die” IPA label, for example, depicts a skeleton astride a motorcycle.
For all six beers, the neck label and bottle cap are printed with the image of a skull plus brand identification. Albuquerque, N.M.-based artist Sean Wells created the paintings that are the basis for the Day of the Dead label graphics.
Day of the Dead’s brand owner, Cerveceria Mexicana, Tecate, Mexico, took an artistic approach with the labels to position the brand as artisanal and premium quality.
“What really sets us apart is we’re the very first craft beer ever to come out of Mexico,” says Joe Belli, national sales manager, Cerveceria Mexicana. “When you have such [high] quality art and labeling, you really have to have good product inside the bottle.”
He adds, “We spent a lot of time perfecting the recipes. We went through 42 different recipes to come up with these six.”
The brand owner added an interesting twist to the label by incorporating twin perforations that run down the side of package. These make it easy for consumers to remove the label before tossing the bottle in the recycling bin and also make “the clear PET bottle easier to detect and divert to the correct recycling stream,” Sammut says.
The Upbeat product comes in two flavors, Mango & Passion Fruit and Strawberry, with the labels color-coded by flavor. “Upbeat is made with real fruit, so they also have an image of the fruit on them,” says Susie Hignett, Good Whey brand manager.
Label converter CCL Label Decorative Sleeves, Norfolk, England, prints the labels using UV flexography. CCL prints the Strawberry label in six colors plus white, and it prints the Mango & Passion Fruit label in seven colors plus white.
On a first-name basis
Digital label-printing technology powered a Coca-Cola branding campaign that generated considerable buzz in the packaging community in 2013. Coca-Cola Co., Atlanta, worked with 18 label converters throughout Europe to produce nearly 800 million personalized labels for its Share a Coca-Cola campaign. The brand owner distributed the limited-time bottles in 32 countries.
Each of the labels was printed with a first name that’s common in the country or region where the bottle would be sold. The name appeared on the front of the label where the Coca-Cola logo is normally printed, and in roughly the same size. In each country, 150 names specific to the locale were used — representing a total of 15 languages and five alphabets.
The campaign, which targeted teenagers, also included a social media component. The Share a Coca-Cola website provided a Share Wall where consumers could share a virtual Coca-Cola decorated with a friend’s name, even if that name wasn’t on the labels.
Creating the massive number of personalized labels needed for the campaign required a combination of conventional and digital printing. Ten label converters printed the labels with all the standard information, such as nutritional facts, using conventional presses. Then another eight converters printed the names on the labels with digital presses. The substrate for the wraparound labels was a 38-micron, biaxially oriented polypropylene (BOPP) film.
Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif., supplied the HP Indigo WS6000 presses used for the digital printing. To assure color consistency and protect Coca-Cola’s brand equity, HP formulated a special red ink for the personalized labels that’s an exact match for the color on the regular labels.
After the various printing steps, the personalized labels were applied to 375- and 500-ml PET bottles of Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola Light and Coca-Cola Zero on existing high-speed bottling lines.
