This article is inspired by a podcast interview with Mike Seitel of Norwalt Automation. Listen to the podcast here.
An automation specialist is bringing digital inkjet into the production line, with implications for inventory, uptime and the economics of packaging.
Mike Seitel applied for a printing patent before he knew what CMYK meant. For the owner and chief executive of Norwalt, this unfamiliarity proved useful. Customers had asked his automation business to eliminate labels from their production lines. He approached the request as another manufacturing problem to solve. The conventions of the printing industry would have to wait.
Norwalt brought half a century of manufacturing experience. Founded in 1971 by Seitel’s father, Norbert, and Walter McDonald, the family business began with feeding systems that sorted plastic parts. It expanded into assembly equipment for consumer goods, including deodorant packaging, and later into medical devices and pharmaceuticals. During the pandemic, COVID test assembly became an urgent priority. Moving products reliably through complex processes was familiar territory.
Printing entered the picture by understanding customer frustration. Labels required purchasing, storage and management, sometimes in specially controlled rooms. Norwalt already handled containers through operations such as filling and capping before passing them to a labelling machine. Adding decoration directly to that process seemed a logical extension. An early prototype encouraged the team, although the pandemic interrupted its development.
The resulting proposition places direct-to-shape digital inkjet inside the production line. That matters because a printer’s value depends partly on what happens around it. A machine capable of changing images instantly offers limited flexibility if containers must still be moved through cumbersome separate operations. Norwalt’s starting point is the movement of the product through the factory.
Seitel describes an engineering discipline that begins with the object being handled. Its shape, orientation and behaviour determine the machinery around it. “Don’t try to make it fit the machine,” he says. Complicated tasks are broken into simple operations, then combined. The ambition is a line whose individual stages work consistently together, including the printing.
Demand makes that approach increasingly relevant to Norwalt’s customers. Seitel sees manufacturers moving towards smaller runs and more frequent changes. Social media can abruptly turn an obscure product into a bestseller, leaving a producer with ample filling capacity and insufficient labels. Ingredient substitutions create another headache, requiring revised packaging information and replacement stocks of printed material.
Digital printing could remove some of that delay. Once revised artwork is approved, changing the printed image need not require a fresh delivery of labels. Approval itself remains necessary; inkjet cannot abolish a company’s decision processes. But it can shorten the interval between a decision and its execution, while reducing the inventory committed to particular product variants. The potential return extends beyond the label itself. Less money sits in stocks of packaging materials, fewer labels become obsolete after product changes, and production can respond while consumers are still interested.
These advantages depend on keeping pace with production. Seitel says the turret and tooling of Norwalt’s high-speed platform were designed to handle 600 products a minute. That is a mechanical capability, rather than a claim that every application can already be printed at that rate. Printhead performance remains a constraint, and improvements require cooperation with component suppliers.
Reliability receives unforgiving treatment. Norwalt’s factory acceptance tests can involve at least eight hours of continuous running under customer scrutiny. A stopwatch settles questions that a demonstration might leave unanswered. Seitel applies the same discipline to printing equipment as to other automation. Customers buying a production system need sustained output across a shift.
Maintenance complicates the calculation. Printhead cleaning consumes time even when automated, reducing the productive availability of the machine. Seitel would like head manufacturers to make maintenance easier to integrate. For now, the rest of the equipment must perform well enough to accommodate those interruptions. The economics depend on usable output after stoppages and cleaning are included.
Adoption poses a separate engineering challenge. Few manufacturers can casually suspend a working line to accommodate an unfamiliar technology. Norwalt is developing compact systems using magnetic levitation to transport products, drawing on work in pharmaceutical assembly. Configurable layouts could help printing fit into awkward spaces, with containers diverted from an existing line and returned after decoration.
Seitel expects some customers to retain their labelling machines while learning to trust the digital alternative. This offers a practical route to adoption: introduce the capability, establish its performance and expand its role as confidence grows. An installed machine that operators understand provides a firmer basis for investment than a sweeping promise about the factory of tomorrow.
Consumer goods offer an obvious market, especially personal care, household products, food and beverages. Yet the opportunity that most surprises Seitel concerns information on the back of the pack. Ingredients and readable two-dimensional codes may generate demand for direct printing. Their commercial value comes from the information they carry and the processes they support.
GS1’s Sunrise 2027 initiative adds momentum by setting an industry goal for retail checkout systems to read and process standardised 2D barcodes by the end of 2027. Connected codes can support traceability and access to product information. Seitel sees an opening for printing these accurately at production speeds. Such applications could justify investment alongside, or independently of, personalised decoration.
His longer view is more ambitious. Norwalt is already working on robotic changeovers and is exploring AI diagnostics within its machines. Seitel imagines factories with far fewer people and production lines where direct printing displaces labellers. These are ambitions whose fulfilment will depend on convincing manufacturers that the systems can deliver consistently in their own operating conditions.
Norwalt’s contribution is the perspective it brings to that test. Its mechanical engineers, controls programmers and machine vision specialists can address the surrounding process as well as the print operation. “We’re the automation company that can print for you,” Seitel says. This makes the conversation about the performance of an entire manufacturing system.
The eventual pace of adoption will be determined on the factory floor. Manufacturers will weigh the flexibility gained against the cost of installation, maintenance and disruption. Norwalt’s bet is that experience moving and assembling products can help make digital printing a dependable part of that calculation. For an industry accustomed to discussing the printer, the surrounding production line deserves attention.