Durham Box unveils major investment in new digital facility

Leading corrugated packaging manufacturers, Durham Box, has made a major investment in an EFI Nozomi C18000 digital press. The firm announced its plans at the recent FESPA Global Print Expo 2019 in Munich. The deal was signed in March and installation begins shortly, with their new digital corrugated printing facility scheduled to be up and running at the beginning of July.

Based in Bishop Auckland, Co Durham, Durham Box is a private, family owned business, servicing a broad segment of the corrugated packaging market. With a turnover of £12.5m, the firm occupies a 10,220 sqm site, employs around 75 staff and makes in excess of 35 million products per year. As part of the wider £3m plus investment program, the company has acquired an adjacent property which includes an existing building with further land for development. The Nozomi will be housed within an existing building which will be dedicated purely to digital print.

Looking after 500+ customers and producing a range of products on its four flexo production lines including shelf-ready, protective and promotional packaging, the company operates in a number of sectors including food and drink, medical and industrial producing runs from 200 to 20,000, as well as outsourcing a small amount of point-of-sale work. With the new Nozomi configured with four colours and dual-lane printing, it will provide Durham Box with the capability to increase productivity on short and medium run jobs as required.

Operating at speeds up to 75 linear metres per minute and being 1.8m wide, the Nozomi press will deliver significant time savings in production, superior image quality and the ability to create personalised prints.

“The image quality, running speed and ease of changing between prints is hugely attractive,” said Dan Morris, joint managing director of Durham Box. “We regularly get asked to print jobs that are too challenging for our own flexo capabilities and as a consequence we need to manipulate the artwork which is time consuming and ultimately leads to a simplified image – and that can be frustrating to the customer. The wide range of print finishes is a great feature from the Nozomi, as it has the ability to produce print that has similar qualities to flexo – only better – with high gloss photo-quality print.”

“With this investment we are confident we can operate in several markets with a single machine,” he added.

Durham Box is the first UK packaging producer to invest in a Nozomi and will be looking to increase its workforce following installation of the press.