Personalized Printing Spherical Bubble Gum
Category Innovation: Personalized Printing Solution for Spherical Bubble Gum
With the intensification of competition in the leisure candy market, traditional spherical bubble gum that relies solely on color differentiation gradually lacks recognition. Mr. Lucas, an old customer from Nigeria, purchased the Zhonghong Machinery spherical bubble gum production line in 2015 and requested personalized printing of expressions and patterns on the surface of the bubble gum, hoping to enhance the product's market competitiveness through differentiated design.
Technical breakthrough: feasibility analysis of two printing schemes
The Zhonghong Machinery technical team compared and demonstrated two printing technology routes based on customer needs:
Roller printing scheme:
- Technical principle: Dip edible pigments into a roller and rolling print on the surface of the bubble gum moving on the conveyor belt.
- Advantages: Fast production speed, able to complete about 12000 printed characters per hour, suitable for large-scale production.
- Limitations: Spherical bubble gum is prone to sliding on conveyor belts and is easily displaced by roller pressure during printing. The accuracy of monochrome printing is acceptable, but the pattern misalignment rate during multi-color overprinting can reach over 35%, which cannot meet customers' requirements for pattern integrity.
Press type printing scheme:
- Technical principle: Fix the bubble gum in a customized circular mold, press the printing head vertically downwards to complete printing, with precise positioning for each individual piece. When printing multiple colors, the pattern alignment can be ensured through secondary positioning of the mold.
- Advantages: High positioning accuracy, pattern misalignment rate less than 2%, printing clarity and integrity can meet customer needs; Support multi-color printing, which can achieve precise reproduction of complex patterns such as expressions, eyeballs, and tongues.
- Limitations: The single batch printing volume is relatively small, and the initial design capacity is about 6000 pieces per hour. Efficiency needs to be improved by optimizing the mold layout.
Solution implementation: Research and application of customized printing production line
The technical team has finally determined the combination scheme of "round rolling machine+press type printing machine":
- Pre rounding process: An umbrella shaped rounding machine is installed in the original production line to improve the uniformity of the formed bubble gum shape to 95% through high-speed rotation and kneading, with a diameter error controlled within ± 0.1cm, providing a foundation for subsequent precise printing.
- Optimize printing equipment: Upgrade the mold layout of the press type printing machine from 4 pieces/time to 6 pieces/time, and cooperate with the automatic loading and unloading system to ultimately achieve a stable production capacity of 6840 pieces/hour, meeting customer production needs.
- Edible ink adaptation: Water based edible ink is selected to ensure that the printed patterns have no odor or residue, comply with Nigeria's food contact material safety standards, and have good adhesion to prevent the patterns from falling off during packaging and transportation of bubble gum.
Market feedback: Commercial success of personalized products
After multiple rounds of debugging, the pattern clarity and color reproduction of printed bubble gum have met customer expectations. Mr. Lucas purchased one set of printing equipment in the first batch, and the facial expression pattern bubble gum launched after production quickly became a popular item in the local market. Subsequently, the customer purchased 2 additional sets of equipment for producing bubble gum with multi-color complex patterns such as eyeballs and tongues. The product sales increased by more than 30% compared to traditional models, further consolidating its leading position in the Nigerian candy market.
