Festive Fun at Iceland with Benson Group Packaging

February 2009

Benson Group, headquartered in Bardon, Leicestershire, the UK packaging company of the year, has released details of a mammoth festive packaging production run for leading frozen-food supermarket Iceland. The folding carton specialist produced packaging for some 53 Iceland product lines, including production for a great many European stores as well as UK outlets.

Working closely with Iceland's in-house studio run by Trident, work started on this Christmas extravaganza way back in March 2008, with trial runs of Iceland's preferred pack designs. Trident's Tony Reid said in December 2008: "We use those initial trial runs to establish the feasibility of graphic designs to work across a wide range of different product lines, and to get a real feel for the printability of the packs. The first actual production runs then started to take place in May at Benson Group's Integrated Packaging site in Gateshead. Subsequent work has been undertaken at Integrated, PDG in Newcastle, and Benson Box in Leicestershire. All of the first production runs are now completed, but we still expect some repeat orders to be placed on the more successful lines - this is, of course, all sales dependent."

The Integrated Packaging site has a significant history of working with Iceland, and the benefits of the company now being part of the multi-site Benson Group have been seen as a major plus for both Iceland and Trident. "With its three food packaging production sites, Benson Group provides the extended capacity that is essential at this busy time of year," said Tony Reid. "They offer a consistency of production across the three facilities, and effective communication between the operations to ensure that Iceland get what they want.

"The group is now making advances with the ISO 12647-2 colour standard in order to be able to guarantee identical colour reproduction at the three sites, which will be another significant bonus for us in the future."

The introduction of this standard throughout Benson Group's food-packaging production centres will also be an important benefit to Iceland's European-based packaging partners. "We have been delighted by the number of European packaging companies that have wanted us to be involved in the printing of Iceland carton products for them - we have been working with many countries for the Iceland project, including France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Poland," said Mark Kerridge, Managing Director of Benson Group. "Our plans to complete the requirements of the ISO 12467-2 colour standard will enable us to further guarantee standard colour quality throughout any retailers' product range. It will mark a significant step forward for us as a business, and will, we believe, be very well received by our customers."

Production requirements for 2008's Iceland range started at 100,000 pieces and extended to runs runs of up to 500,000, with product being supplied to nearly 30 individual product manufacturers.