SA Litho was recently awarded Mellow Colour’s Club 100 certification – the first printer in South Africa to receive this accolade. Proudly displaying certificates of proficiency are SA Litho’s joint general managers, David White (left) and Peter Sproul (right), with Woolworths’ Jerome Harrison (centre) and Mark and Laura Minter of DigitalView.

In three short months, SA Litho implemented and reached Proficient  Print status for the Mellow Colour program – the fastest recorded by  any printer in the world.

IN today’s challenging trading conditions, brand owners and retailers face a number of demands when dealing with their print suppliers. ‘Quality is a core value at Woolworths – it’s what sets us apart. That’s why we take great pride in maintaining the highest level of print quality and colour management with our suppliers,’ says Raven Gengiah, artwork production manager, Woolworths Marketing.

To live up to these ideals, Woolworths embarked on an exciting journey to maintain the highest print precision quality across its Australian and South African operations, and has partnered with Mellow Color as its preferred colour management service provider.

Mellow Colour provides colour quality management systems for some of the world’s most colour critical brands, and provides technical training for leading print and packaging suppliers. The program includes auditing the production workflow, colour theory and colour quality management training, and guidance on Mellow Colour software and procedures.

In this instance, SA Litho Label Printers, a division of CTP Packaging Western Cape, has recently become one of South Africa’s 12 high-profile print suppliers to have implemented the program.

Even more impressive, SA Litho completed the process in just three months to achieve Mellow Colour Proficient Printer status – the fastest implementation by any print company in the world – beating the usual time period of six to nine months.

Not only has SA Litho achieved all this, but is the first company in South Africa to be awarded Club 100 certification. This honour is bestowed on printers who achieve 100% score on a print job compared to the ISO standard, and only a handful of Club 100 certificates are awarded annually to top-performing printers.

Mellow Colour’s virtual sign-off system scores each print job against the internationally-recognised ISO standard allowing the print supplier to unload colour data to the brand owner, avoiding the need to conduct costly and time-consuming press-side colour passes. Colour quality and consistency are guaranteed by adhering to predetermined standard operating procedures, and a print scoring system measures grey balance, dot gain and overprints.

According to Laura Minter of DigitalView (Mellow Colour’s local distributor), SA Litho was able to realise these achievements as many of the quality management controls recommended by the Mellow Colour program were already in place and merely required some tweaks for final auditing.

Printers agree that Mellow Colour is not just a tool for brand owners, but offers valuable print quality management. This results in faster turnaround times, fewer reprints and happy customers, while reduced waste and time savings result in more profitable production.

‘We’ve also seen some additional side benefits from our Mellow Colour installation,’ comments Leon Witbooi, MD of CTP Packaging Western Cape. ‘Our production staff can now see how their work measures up to the ISO standard. Not only does this create healthy competition, it also brings a sense of pride in achieving the highest score possible,’ he confirms.

Loubser, G. 2018, “SA Litho Scores a Perfect 100”, Packaging and Print Media, 10 January, pp. 57-58.