2 self adhesive coating lines, running water based and hotmelt coating heads

On the way back from holiday I took the opportunity of visting one of the European label material suppliers in Spain, and was allowed to take a few pictures of their very impressive new operation.  Established on this site about 3 years ago, Manter run a very slick operation with 2 coating lines, pictured above.  Each line has 2 reel of paper as inputted raw materials, together with a supply of liquid adhesive and liquid silicone, all of which are combined at speeds of hundreds of meter per minute to make a self adhesive label construction.

If you dont know much about the labelling industry, all suppliers (inlcuding us at the Mercian Labels group) buy material from suppliers like Manter who throw out enormous volumes of self adhesive coated papers and synthetics, which we then print on and covert to produce individual labels.  Pretty much every label you ever see started life on machines like these!

the automated picking line for loading raw materials into the lines

Manter have invested in very impressive automation to make their operation more efficient and this robotic picking facility to load up the lines really is cutting edge stuff.

Many slitting lines are used to slit the coated material into smaller reels that we label printers use as our raw material

They have many slitting lines to convert the finished material (often 1.5m wide by many KMs long) into smaller reels that label printers like us can use.

Overall, it was a short but very informative visit, and I came away very impressed with their facility and approach to business.