Litho-Lam

The litho-laminated corrugated box is a special category of packaging UPB is proud to offer. Our printing and corrugated box expertise allows us easy entry into litho-laminated corrugated box production, and we offer all production in-house.

In litho-lam production, artwork disks are produced, read and corrected before plate production. All processes are completed in a controlled environment, under our own roof. The litho-lam cycle is further shortened by our ability to print multiple colors in one pass on a large format press—like our MAN Roland seven-color press—with the finishing of the laminate work also done in-house.

Why Litho-Lam?

With the advent of warehouse stores (Costco, Sam’s Club, etc.), conventional folding cartons were not strong enough to be stacked as high as the price club format demanded. If the products were too heavy, the boxes below would be crushed. The obvious packaging answer was corrugated boxes, but the graphics afforded by conventional corrugated box printing—flexography—was not fine enough for a displayed product. Companies began laminating a colorful label to regular corrugated boxes. This process was expensive as it required four substrates; bottom liner, medium liner, top liner and a lithographed label. The process was slow and the quality uneven. A better solution was to preprint the top liner from better quality printing board, and laminate it to single-face corrugated. Thus, the birth of lithographically laminated boxes, created by the process called "litho lam."

Litho sheets were traditionally purchased from an outside printer, then applied to the corrugated boxes at the corrugated manufacturing plant. If the customer was unhappy with the product, blame was tossed back and forth from the laminator to the printer—with the customer caught in the middle. Quickening and clarifying the process, UPB offers the solution by adding litho-laminated corrugated boxes to our line of service.

UPB is Litho-Lam.