Pick up almost any labeled product near you — the bottle, the box, the drum, the pill bottle — and there’s a very good chance its label came off a flexographic press. It’s the workhorse of the label world, and it’s the machine your labels run on when you order from us. So here’s a plain look at what a flexo press actually is, what’s on our floor in Hillsborough, and why the box matters as much as the artwork you feed into it.
A flexographic press prints your label by transferring ink through a flexible relief plate, one color per station, at high speed on a continuous roll — then cures, die-cuts, and rewinds it in the same pass. We run four: a Nilpeter 13” 7-color (our flagship), a Nilpeter 11” 6-color, a Roto 16” 4-color wide-format, and an Allied Gear 10” with inline overlaminating. Every press also runs inline video inspection that looks at every single label, not a sample.
Strip away the branding and every flexo press does the same thing: it moves a roll of label stock past a line of printing stations, one per color, and lays down ink in a fraction of a second at each one. Here’s the relay race happening inside:
Printing, curing, die-cutting, rewinding — all of it happens in one continuous pass. Blink and a few hundred labels have already gone by.
Why the anilox matters to you: it's the reason label #40,000 looks identical to label #1. When a printer can't clearly explain how they hold color across a long run, the anilox is usually the part they're fuzzy on.
Nilpeter is a Danish press manufacturer founded in 1919, and among commercial label printers its narrow- and mid-web flexo presses are widely regarded as the benchmark for print quality and mechanical precision. That reputation isn’t marketing — it comes down to a few things that are hard to see and easy to feel in the finished label.
Registration is how tightly each color station lines up with the others. On a 7-color job, all seven layers have to stack precisely — miss by fractions of a millimeter and you get visible color fringing or blur. Nilpeter’s mechanical design and servo-driven registration systems hold tighter registration than lower-cost press platforms, and they hold it across the run.
Consistent impression pressure drives both consistent ink transfer and clean die cutting. Nilpeter’s impression control keeps tight tolerances across the full print width and from the start of a run to the end of it.
Nilpeter presses build UV curing units in between (or after) each color station. Curing inline is what lets you print on non-absorbent substrates — BOPP, polyester, foil — that wet inks would smear on, and it leaves a harder, more chemically resistant surface.
A press that holds registration at a crawl but drifts at production speed isn’t a production press. Nilpeter equipment stays on spec at real running speeds, which is exactly what long runs and high-volume programs demand.
Certified Labeling Solutions runs four production presses in Hillsborough, NJ. Here’s the lineup and what each one is for:
| Press | Print width | Colors | Standout capability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nilpeter (flagship) | 13” | 7-color + UV | Full CMYK plus spot colors, or up to seven Pantone spot colors, plus overprint varnish — in a single pass |
| Nilpeter | 11” | 6-color + UV | Medium-complexity programs; same substrate and adhesive range as the 13” |
| Roto | 16” | 4-color | Wide-format work — extended content labels, large industrial and food-service labels |
| Allied Gear | 10” | 5-color | Inline overlaminating station for scratch, chemical, and outdoor durability |
A few notes worth pulling out of the table:
Good to know — every label gets looked at. All four presses run inline video web inspection: a camera system scans every label at full production speed and flags print defects, missing labels, and die-cut issues in real time for the operator to address. Defective labels are marked for removal before finishing. This isn't spot-checking a sample — it's every label on the roll.
The equipment is only interesting because of what it does for the labels in your hand:
The press is the foundation of label quality, which is why we’ve built our floor around Nilpeter production equipment. The labels we make carry our customers’ brands and their compliance obligations — food manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, industrial producers — and that’s not the place for “close enough.”
Want to talk through what your labels would run on? Call (908) 495-6235 or request a quote, and we’ll match your artwork, substrate, and finish to the right press.
A flexographic press prints labels by moving a continuous roll of label stock past a line of printing stations, one per color. At each station, an anilox roller meters a precise amount of ink onto a flexible photopolymer plate carrying the artwork, which stamps the image onto the material. The press then UV-cures the ink, die-cuts the labels to shape, and rewinds finished rolls, all in one continuous pass.
Nilpeter is a Danish press manufacturer founded in 1919, and among commercial label printers its narrow- and mid-web flexographic presses are widely regarded as the benchmark for print quality and mechanical precision. The reputation rests on tight servo-driven color registration, consistent impression control across the full print width, inline UV curing between stations, and stability at real production speeds rather than just at a crawl.
Certified Labeling Solutions runs four production presses at its Hillsborough, NJ facility: a Nilpeter 13-inch 7-color press with UV curing (the flagship), a Nilpeter 11-inch 6-color press, a Roto 16-inch 4-color press for wide-format work, and an Allied Gear 10-inch 5-color press with an inline overlaminating station. All four run inline video web inspection that checks every label at full production speed.
Inline video web inspection is a camera system that scans every label at full production speed and flags print defects, missing labels, and die-cut issues in real time so the press operator can address them. Defective labels are marked for removal before finishing. Unlike spot-checking a sample, it looks at every single label on the roll before the order ships.
UV lamps flash-cure the ink instantly at each station, so there is no smearing and no waiting for ink to dry. Curing inline is what makes it possible to print on non-absorbent substrates like BOPP, polyester, and foil that wet inks would smear on, and UV-curable inks leave a harder, more chemically resistant print surface than solvent or water-based inks.
The anilox roller is the key. It is a metal or ceramic roller engraved with millions of microscopic cells, each holding a metered volume of ink measured in BCM (billion cubic microns). Paired with a doctor blade that wipes away excess ink, it delivers the same ink film thickness on every rotation regardless of press speed, which is why label 40,000 looks identical to label 1.
Send us a sample, artwork, or just your specs — we'll quote it fast. Manufacturing in Hillsborough, NJ since 1986, shipping nationwide.
