Lollicup USA Purchases First In-house Flexo Press from Koenig & Bauer
Left to right: The leadership team of CFO Marvin Cheng and CEO Alan Yu lead Lollicup USA, a fast-growing premier beverage and disposable goods supplier and manufacturer for the food service industry.
DALLAS - August 14, 2018 - Responding to a surge in the food container market, especially for eco-friendly products, and guided by its skillful leadership team of CEO Alan Yu and CFO Marvin Cheng, Lollicup USA, Inc., a fast-growing premier beverage and disposable goods supplier and manufacturer for the food service industry, has chosen to support its growth by inking a contract for the newest generation Koenig & Bauer-Flexotecnica EVO XG press. This elite manufacturer has quickly expanded to encompass five locations including its current headquarters in Chino, Calif., and its new 660,000-sq.-ft. production and manufacturing plant in Rockwall, TX, which is currently being built outside of Dallas. It is this new facility that will operate the new Koenig & Bauer-Flexotecnica EVO XG press.
“Our customer base here in the U.S. has quickly expanded in the past five years and we’re seeing special attention on orders for eco-friendly products,” says Alan Yu, CEO of Lollicup USA. “Since I have experience seeing the industry from different vantage points, it allows me to easily solve customer challenges. I like to personally work with customers on a daily basis and use my knowledge to help them grow and succeed in this competitive market.”
Having forged a deep trustworthy relationship with its customers, Lollicup USA has seen its growth soar. In fact, it has been on Inc. magazine’s 5000’s fastest growing companies list for the past five years in a row. To remain committed to its customers, Lollicup USA is seeking the finest equipment and technology to serve its needs.
“We’re definitely working on purchasing the best new technology to help better serve our customers,” says Marvin Cheng, Lollicup’s CFO. “We want to stay ahead of market trends while quickly and efficiently serving our customers with better shipping and more manufacturing. This means finding new forms of innovative technology to help us with this demand. Our market is requiring changes to our printing services, asking up to be more accessible and, from our perspective, we need equipment that provides high quality, efficiency, fast turnaround, and is easy to maintain.”
It was that endeavor that led Lollicup management to decide to purchase its first in-house flexo press. After researching the available models in the market, management chose the newest generation Koenig & Bauer-Flexotecnica EVO-XG press for its new Rockwall, TX facility. Developed for increased printing widths and higher printing speeds, the sleeve gearless EVO-XG press provides greater efficiency and productivity.
“We had been thinking about purchasing our own printing press for a long period of time,” says Jason Lee, Lollicup USA’s assistant plant manager. “We decided to move forward when we started building our new plant in Texas. We chose Koenig & Bauer-Flexotecnica due to its superb printing capabilities, which will provide our customers with the quality and turnaround that they demand. We also believe that it will be a great addition to help us fill custom print orders. We forecast a 60% increase in our printing capabilities. We were quite impressed with the service and support that we received from Koenig & Bauer Flexotecnica and we’re pleased that its headquarters is local to our new plant.”
The new Koenig & Bauer Flexotecnica EVO XG is equipped with numerous automated features that will improve efficiency and greatly reduce makeready times at Lollicup’s Rockwall facility. With the extraordinary demand of orders being placed, Lollicup feels that the EVO XG will reduce turnaround time printing its paper cups. The EVO XG is built with many important engineering and design details, such as its heavy construction cast-iron closed-design frames to the high-precision solid print deck featuring anti-vibration mechanical elements, which will provide Lollicup with an extremely robust press with outstanding flexibility well suited to printing at high speeds on various substrates. This prestigious model is designed to be user friendly with the highest level of automation. It will be ideal for Lollicup’s short, medium and long runs by reducing job changeover times while effectively minimizing down time and waste. In turn Lollicup will see increases in operation uptime and printing profitability.
“This will be the key workhorse for our facility producing paper cups,” says Lee. “It gives us the ability to have in-house printing of our paper cups. In addition, we plan to run new specialty substrates in the future and expand our printing capabilities to the packaging board market.”
Currently, Lollicup is seeing a trend in eco-friendly products, specifically straws. Multiple cities across the United States are starting to ban plastic straws. So the firm decided to offer eco-friendly straws to help customers avoid these bans. The firm has also noticed that there has been a large demand for straws, which its production team is challenged to keep up with, so its team has developed two new lids that don’t require straws. This new product allows customers to easily comply with these bans and move towards a more eco-friendlier route.
Lollicup USA continues to innovate and grow, especially with many positive changes throughout 2018. The firm has launched 83 new products this year to keep up with market needs and customer requests. It has opened a new warehouse in New Jersey to better serve the East Coast quickly and efficiently.
“One of the biggest decisions we made was to manufacture in the U.S.,” says Yu. “This decision has allowed us to grow our product line. More importantly, it has allowed us to quality check our products with our quality control team. That has positively impacted our company. We’re proud of the investment of an estimated $50 million in the new plant, which is scheduled for completion in October 2018. It will employ approximately 200 new employees once it opens. This new facility will allow the company to better service the region, while also making it possible for Lollicup to surpass its annual sales goals and production capacity. We project that we’ll post $180 million in sales by the end of this year, which displays growth over the previous year.”
The preceding press release was provided by a company unaffiliated with Printing Impressions. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of Printing Impressions.
