Why 40 Years in Business Still Matters When Choosing a Label Manufacturer

Certified Labeling Solutions Inc. has operated from 51 Old Camplain Rd, Hillsborough Township, NJ 08844 since 1986. Not a successor company, not an acquisition — the same business at the same address, with a management team that knows the production floor firsthand. The practical payoff: when a press question, a material issue, or a tricky spec comes up, the person answering the phone has handled that exact category of problem for decades. You’re not funding someone’s on-the-job training.

A 40-year history doesn’t mean 40-year-old machines — it means four decades of reinvesting in the press floor. Certified Labeling Solutions runs a Nilpeter 13” 7-color and a Nilpeter 11” 6-color (Danish-built narrow-web flexo presses widely considered a quality benchmark), a Rotoflex 16” for wider-format runs, and an Allied Gear 10” with inline overlaminating. Every press carries inline video web inspection, so labels are checked electronically as they run rather than spot-sampled afterward. That level of capital investment — plus ANSI/ISO barcode verification and Pantone/PMS spot-color matching — is exactly what a new shop hasn’t had time to build.

Several current Certified Labeling Solutions clients have been ordering for 20 or more years; Domino Foods, Lipo Chemicals, and American Sugar Refining are among the long-tenured accounts. Manufacturers don’t keep a label vendor for two decades on price alone — they stay because the labels are right, the relationship is dependable, and problems get resolved. Keeping a major food or chemical account across multiple plant managers and product-line generations is direct evidence of consistency at scale.

Certified Labeling Solutions sources 100% domestic raw materials — face stocks, adhesives, and inks — a practice held since the beginning, even when offshore stock was cheaper. The benefit is boring until it isn’t: no extended overseas lead times, no quality drift from international lots, and far less exposure to global supply shocks. During the 2020–2022 supply-chain disruptions, that domestic footing meant fewer material shortages than suppliers dependent on overseas inputs faced.

Four decades of jobs means thousands of dies already in stock. If your label is a standard shape, there’s usually no tooling charge — you skip a cost a newer supplier would have to pass along. Standard new flexo jobs run about two weeks from artwork approval; reorders on tooling we already hold often turn in a week or less. The library is a direct, dollar-and-days advantage of having been at this since 1986.

Every account gets one dedicated point of contact — not a customer-service queue. That’s the person who knows your die number, your stored plates, your material spec, and your usual lead time without looking them up. Knowing your program cold is exactly the kind of thing that develops over years, not weeks.