Newsletter #6 | A peek behind the scenes: How to make a beverage coaster

Station 6: The Printing Press

This series of articles, titled “How to make a beverage coaster,” sees us answer the following question: How are beverage coasters actually made? Once the board machine is done, the next stop is the print shop, where blank board sheets are printed on the way the customer wants.

Precision in motion – our printing press in use

Our new site of the Koehler Group in Willstätt started operations in the summer of 2024. And right at the center of the KATZ production floor is the heart of the site: our printing press, which is integrated into a fully automatic upstream and downstream logistics system.

The machine is 28 meters long, 4.5 meters tall, and reflects the latest in technology. It draws in flat wood pulp board sheets at impressive speeds, aligns them perfectly, and prints the required images on them with offset printing – pin-sharp, with vibrant colors, and accurate to the millimeter.

The press can process a maximum of 16,000 sheets per hour, and every single movement is perfection incarnate. During this process, a sophisticated monitoring system monitors the corresponding color, preciseness, and quality in real time. The end result? More than just board that has been merely printed on – instead, what we get are beverage coasters with an extremely broad range of images and colors.

In addition, our new printing press is different from the previous one at our site in Weisenbach in that it uses automated processes to make our workers’ day-to-day work easier, with an example including a fully automatic pallet changer.

If you missed station 3 of the article series “How to make a beverage coaster”, click here