Curtis Packaging Achieves Success with Custom Koenig & Bauer Rapida 145 10-Unit Press
The team at Curtis Packaging marks one year of operating its custom-designed Koenig & Bauer Rapida 145. From left: Paul Jeannenot, Kerry Brown, Joseph Clark, Gabriel Taranto, Martin Perry, and Timothy Brantley. | Credit: Koenig & Bauer
As it marks one year of operating its new custom-designed Koenig & Bauer Rapida 145 57-inch nine-color press plus coater, drying units, and an end-of-press printing unit at its 150,000 sq ft Sandy Hook, CT headquarters, Curtis Packaging, a luxury packaging manufacturer in the U.S., is reporting high quality, efficiency, speed, and volume from its new press. The new Koenig & Bauer large format model, built specifically to provide high-end solutions and carton production for the firm’s long list of the world’s most discerning global brands in the cosmetic, spirits, chocolate, golf, and pharmaceutical markets, is providing top-shelf color and quality while adding 50 percent more capacity and volume and allowing Curtis to continue its rapid growth and attract new customers.
“This is the key press on our manufacturing floor,” says Kerry Brown, chief operating officer at Curtis. “It’s perfectly designed with all the most important and unique bells and whistles only available from Koenig & Bauer.”
Due to the extremely high-end brands that Curtis serves, the Rapida’s color management and quality control technology stands out as one of its most beneficial features because Curtis’s customers require managed superior color documented in a very scientific way. To achieve utmost quality, Curtis is running the Rapida 145’s technically advanced Koenig & Bauer QualiTronic ColorControl inline color management system and Koenig & Bauer’s inline QualiTronic QualityPass along with G7 and System Brunner Instrument Flight technology and 65% of its jobs are four-color and seven-color expanded gamut. Brown is proud to announce that the firm just landed a new large client due to all of the quality management on the new press.
“Our world-class customers are astounded at how we run the press wide open at maximum speed with the highest color management on every single job day in and day out,” says Brown. “They recognize the extraordinary achievement that our incredible team achieves every day. Plus, Koenig & Bauer’s technology allows us to report directly with our customers sheet by sheet so that they know exactly what they are getting on each job. This is something that we couldn’t have fathomed ten years ago and now it’s at our fingertips.”
This past year, Curtis was honored to receive the top prize—the Folding Carton of the Year award from the Paperboard Packaging Council—for its Masters Prov1 Vintage Family luxury paperboard packaging. “These extraordinary folding cartons don’t just look like leather—they even feel like it, redefining what a carton can be,” said the PPC. Made to showcase golf products at the Masters Tournament, the cartons needed an innovative yet timeless and classic design. Curtis delivered, masterfully replicating the look and feel of two different types of leather.
Founded in 1845, Curtis has firmly established itself as a leader in environmentally responsible packaging. Most notably, Curtis became the first packaging company in North America to run its entire operation on 100 percent renewable energy, to be entirely Carbon Neutral, FSC / SFI certified, and to become a zero-waste-to-landfill facility. It is also B Corp compliant. Its new Rapida 145 is contributing to that mandate in which Curtis has seen a dramatic 72 percent reduction in energy consumption and less paperboard waste due to the Rapida 145’s technology.
As the preeminent firm looks ahead, it prides itself on its strong corporate strategy, which allows the firm to grow its business and invest in new technology while maintaining a high level of sustainability and quality. “We’re one of the leading privately-owned family-run packaging printers that has been in the market for 180 years,” says Brown. “We’ve forged a strong partnership with Koenig & Bauer for 30 years. We rely on Koenig & Bauer to work together with us collectively and collaboratively in designing unique press models to build beautiful products for our customers.”
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