Digital printing is growing rapidly, and one of the keys to success is the ability to coordinate the hardware (printers and printheads), software and consumables to maximize performance. Memjet has become a leader in the digital printing field, and with its VersaPass, DuraLink and DuraFlex technologies is positioned to move forward in inkjet printing.

John Ortiz, the company’s VP of inks and materials, recently joined Memjet from HP, where he served in leadership roles for 20 years. Ortiz said he had been watching Memjet, and saw a company ready to take off.

“I was in the sustainability area at HP, and when the Memjet opportunity came up, it was really interesting,” Ortiz said. “It’s a really interesting ink technology, and it gets more exciting every day.”

Ortiz noted that DuraLink is designed for more large-scale commercial press applications.

“The ink is tuned for those printheads to run at extremely high speed, at 200 meters a minute and printing at 1600 DPI resolution,” Ortiz observed.

Ortiz said the industry reaction to these technologies has been positive.

“DuraLink customers I’ve spoken to say they are very excited about both the ink technology and the print speeds that they can produce,” he reported. “We’ve also had a great response to DuraFlex. We have a new OEM, Kirk-Rudy, that has been marketing a mailing application and I saw them at PRINT 19 in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. Kirk-Rudy was signing up customers there on the spot. For not a lot of money, you could start a business from that machine. It’s this smaller kind of print engine that’s really democratizing print.

“It was good to see the impact of pigment ink and why Memjet has made this transition to pigments,” he added. “At PRINT 19, there were other technologies nearby. I came up with the term ‘Pigment Envy,’ because pigments create bolder blacks, rich text, good colors, and of course the water fastness.”

DuraFlex, a smaller printer module as compared to DuraLink, is Memjet’s latest offering, and the company is still in the development stages to enhance the inks its offering.

“Inks for both of those families of products are pigment-based,” said Ortiz. “You get the benefit of durability, water fastness, and fade resistance in a pretty challenging print environment.”

Opportunities in Packaging
Ortiz said that packaging solutions offer some of the best opportunities for DuraFlex technology.

“We’re doing quite a bit of work to make sure that when the ink is released, we could claim food packaging compliance,” Ortiz said. “It’s a really challenging area in that compliance aspects are complex. They are regional. One of the things we’ll be doing is coming up with a strategy for how customers can make decisions based on the data that we give them. In a lot of cases, they may take their testing a little bit further just to make sure that they have a compliance solution in addition to any market placement testing requirements, but it would be impossible to do every possible substrate combination.”

“We have some dye-based inks with our VersaPass platform and we’re undergoing some rigorous testing right now on one or two of the ink families,” Ortiz said. “It’s a relatively new area for inkjet. If you’re in package printing, you need to have food compliance because 40% to 50% of the packaging is for food.”

The ability to bring together printhead, printer and ink technology development is a major benefit for Memjet.

“There is a connectedness between the ink and the inkjet technology, “ said Ortiz. “Without the right ink formulation, the technology won’t work as it’s supposed to. It takes several years of co-development to bring these technologies to market.”

The Role of Regulatory in Inkjet Inks
Regulatory compliance used to be an afterthought in ink making. That has changed, especially for food packaging inks. Lisa Nelson, manager, regulatory compliance at Memjet, spoke about the importance of involving regulatory compliance experts in the formulation process.

“You want everything to be acceptable,” said Nelson. “If you don’t do your homework, you might be formulating something that you can’t actually ever go to market with, and that’s not a very good use of resources. This early regulatory focus has been an energizing approach but also very prudent to be included at the very beginnings of a project. The team is starting to have regulatory issues already in the back of their minds.”

Ortiz said that Memjet has to continue to work on a strong quality system around ensuring that nothing changes in the ink when it comes to food compliance requirements.

“It’s ensuring that nothing changes and no new contaminants are added to the solution,” said Ortiz. “That’s a really strong motivation for us not to change their formulation. Our portfolio is an all water-based portfolio. That’s as close to an environmental and food compliant solution as you can get. We have really good control over manufacturing processes so that the formulation doesn’t change and our customers can be assured that the formulation is not going to change throughout its life cycle.”

Nelson said there were differences in the approaches used between DuraLink and DuraFlex from a regulatory perspective.

“With DuraFlex, targeting the food packaging market was very important. Early in the investigation phase even before the team started to optimize potential ink formulations, they would run by me some of the components that they were considering so that I could give them direction, whether the ingredients are registered in the markets that we would like to enter and if it is suitable for use in an ink that is on food packaging,” said Nelson.

“So, every component in DuraFlex had this very early review before they ever put it into the ink,” she added. “All of the components in the current revision are on the Swiss ordinance. We can say that this ink is compliant with the Nestle guidance and this ink is still being worked on. We know that food packaging is one of the primary target markets, and it is something that we are going to be able to do well because of the early focus. This targeted regulatory focus is different than other projects that I have been associated with.”

Talking with customers about regulations can be challenging. “The EU and the US can use different phrases which have slightly different meanings,” Nelson added. “You would think that there would be more standardization around the world. It’s not even the pretend Globally Harmonized System that’s not actually that harmonized. There’s just a hit or miss patchwork around the world. How do you tell your customers? You talk about a risk-based approach versus a hazard-based approach, which is essentially guilty until proven innocent.”