Add some pop to life!

Packaging Solutions

Life is colourful, life is fun! Throw in a bit of ‘Pop’ and you have pretty much summed up the ethos of Italian craft brewer Baladin as it looks to engage millennials with the country’s very first craft beer in cans, branded Pop (short for popular beer).

Passionate owner and brewer Teo Musso – who founded Baladin in Piozzo, Italy, in 1986 – was looking to revamp the look of the range – a challenge gladly taken on by Crown Bevcan Europe & Middle East.

Originally launched in metal packaging in 2015, the products were available in six different designs each featuring different labels – one for each design – lending a sophisticated, collector’s item feel to the brand. Teo’s latest vision was to extend the collectible range while innovating with the printing process.

Supported by Crown’s with its Accents variable printing technology, Baladin developed 12 new standout designs that could be mixed on a single pallet and printed in one go. This process creates a range of cans for brands seeking to encourage customers to view their products as highly customsed or personalised, while printing the cans in just one production run.

Crown’s designers worked closely with Baladin’s graphic artists to ensure the desired result was achieved. Typically, only a small part of the design is decorated using variable printing. For Pop, the process is used on a wider can surface, with six out of the eight colours used being variable. Each can design is numbered from one to 12, making it easy for consumers to collect all the cans after consumption.

The results have been stunning, and Teo was more than impressed that his vision could be brought to life. He said, ‘It has been a rewarding experience in working with Crown to achieve this unprecedented level of customised graphic art on our product packaging. When we started this project, we were looking for striking, colourful designs that would appeal to the millennials’ original tastes. Crown’s beverage can is so much more than a functional tool to contain one of our live beers; it is also an amazing communication device for our brand messaging.’

Crown’s cans are not only stunning and functional, but sustainable too. With the millennial generation acutely aware of climate change and the need to contribute to the circular economy, metal cans provide further appeal to this demographic. Cans are 100% and infinitely recyclable without loss of properties and the infrastructure to collect and process them is advanced across Europe and beyond.

Véronique Curulla, marketing and business development director at Crown Bevcan Europe, said: ‘We are so proud to have been a part of this exciting project with Baladin brewery. The team effort of creative minds and technical experts achieved both the most colourful variable print on the beverage can and occupying the most surface area ever achieved by us with this method. Once again, this shows how dynamic and creative the new and fast growing categories like craft beer are with beverage cans. In addition to being fully recyclable and offering best product protection cans are a gateway to a robust set of decorative finishes which allow for unrestrained creativity.’