By Liz Stevens, writer, Plastics Decorating

The outlook for the plastics decorating industry in 2027 includes challenges posed by cost and supply chain worries, anticipating more domestic manufacturing, improving operations, investing wisely, increasing workforce training and strengthening customer relations. The year also promises advances in equipment integration, recyclable materials, automation and vision-based technologies.

As the new year approaches, Plastics Decorating reached out for input from three companies that offer plastics decorating.

• Form Manufacturing, Coldwater, Ohio, provides injection molding, 3D printing design, prototyping, engineering and production for industrial, aerospace, specialty automotive, lawn and garden and commercial and residential appliance customers. Form Manufacturing’s Kevin Meyer, president, contributed his insights.
• Pad Printing Technology, Bradenton, Florida, specializes in pad printing for medical, aerospace, electronics, commercial and industrial customers. Keith Ekenseair, president, shared Pad Printing Technology’s view of the coming year.
• Sussex Injection Molding, Sussex, Wisconsin, a custom plastic injection molding company offering full-service solutions including design for manufacturing, material selection, prototyping, injection molding, assembly and finishing and more to agriscience, consumer goods, food service, healthcare, industrial, medical and pharma and residential durables customers. The company’s Jim Naatz, vice president of sales and marketing, contributed his expectations for the coming year.

The magazine also queried three industry suppliers on the prospects for 2027.

• Engineered Printing Solutions, East Dorset, Vermont, specializes in custom high-speed pad printing and digital inkjet systems with automation for manufacturing for packaging, medical devices, industrial, sporting goods and promotional products customers. Ken Tyler, national sales manager, offered his take on the coming year.
• Muller Technology, Loveland, Colorado, offers automation and tooling for sustainable, thin-wall packaging and other industrial solutions. The company provides customer-specific, complete mold and automation systems for the food, non-food, healthcare and medical packaging technology sectors. Travis Baker, vice president of sales for automation gave us his take on the 2027 horizon.
• YUPO America, Chesapeake, Virginia, provides premium synthetic substrates for print, package, label and design, including substrates engineered for UV and UV LED ink technology, dual-sided conventional printing material, substrates with adhesive-free microsuction structure and substrate designed for HP Indigo. Brett Newberry, technical sales manager, shared his insights.

Here is more of what plastics injection molders, pad printers, and industry supplier professionals told Plastics Decorating about their expectations for the upcoming year.

Plastics Injection Molders’ and Pad Printers’ Expectations

As you look ahead to 2027, what challenges do you anticipate – whether market-driven, regulatory or otherwise?
Form Manufacturing’s Kevin Meyer: Capital investments in tooling and new product development have felt a bit stagnant for the last 18-24 months. Based on conversations with our customers, we feel that this will continue into 2027 based on the current inflation and interest rate pressure.

Pad Printing Technology’s Keith Ekenseair: We have held prices fairly constant over the past few years, despite the ongoing inflation increase. Thus, the continuation of inflation will bring us to a point whereby we will need to pass cost increases on to our customers, which I anticipate being our biggest challenge in 2027. 

Sussex Injection Molding’s Jim Naatz: We anticipate continued pricing pressure, uncertainty around tariffs and trade policy, and variability in customer demand and project timing. Our quoting activity has been strong, and while we have had success winning new opportunities, it still has been challenging. Customers are looking for competitive tooling and piece-part pricing, which puts greater emphasis on automation, efficient tooling and manufacturing productivity. Matching opportunities to our available press capacity while managing labor, material and overhead costs will remain a priority.
 
How is the current economic climate shaping your approach to strategic planning for the next one to five years?
Meyer: We continue to see interest in domestic manufacturing for new products and reshoring of existing production for parts and programs that traditionally may have been attractive for production in Asia. We continue to evaluate our options to grow production in the US through organic growth or acquisition. And, we’re still working on an 18- to 24-month capital plan, but investment in equipment and process improvement are high on our list.

Ekenseair: The current economic climate continues to make us cautious about expenditures and capital improvements. With inflation continuing, we need to ensure that any capital improvements would provide appropriate returns on the cost of those improvements. In 2027, I believe that investment in our personnel with training and support will greatly outpace our need for equipment investments.

Naatz: The economic climate is reinforcing our focus on profitable growth, customer diversification and disciplined capital investment. We are looking closely at the assumptions behind customer forecasts, and the timing and probability of new programs. Over the next one to five years, our strategy is to pursue markets and customers that fit our strengths in engineering development, molding, automation, assembly and decoration. We also want to make better use of existing capacity while selectively investing in capabilities that support long-term customer needs. Our investment priorities for 2027 include automation, equipment improvements, and employee development and training that strengthen productivity, quality and launch execution. We will evaluate additional molding capacity and specialized equipment where customer commitments and expected returns support the investment.

What are you most optimistic about for 2027?
Ekenseair: During 2027, I am most optimistic about building and strengthening our customer relationships with new and existing customers.  Exceeding our customers’ expectations is a core value in our company. 

Naatz: We are most optimistic about converting our quoting activity and new business pipeline into production, while expanding relationships with existing customers. We see opportunities in energy, irrigation and filtration, pest control, food service and dispensing, and health and wellness products. Our ability to combine molding with automation, assembly and decoration gives us several ways to solve customer challenges.

Industry Suppliers’ Forecast

What lessons from recent disruptions and the current economic situation are influencing 2027 strategy?
Engineered Printing Solutions’ Ken Tyler: We now must take a much longer look at the true landed cost of a project. Our integrated projects can have a longer lead time depending on where the components come from, so we must plan further ahead for those costs. It is challenging because costs can shift significantly over the course of a long build. The supply chain has been very disruptive; we have had challenges with ports and delays. Over the past year, we have had things delayed far longer than we could anticipate, like scenarios where containers were leaving port and we got notification of a six- or eight-week delay. It’s all the more important now to have multi-channel sourcing. And many of our integrated systems are custom engineered. Unlike companies that make one product repeatedly and can see the trends developing, we often build a given configuration only once. Our planning for risk has become much more conservative, and we build that into our quotes up front, so customers aren’t surprised later.

Muller Technology’s Travis Baker: Recent disruptions have reinforced the importance of dependable supply, local manufacturing and service, and factoring in total cost of ownership when evaluating equipment additions. For 2027, I expect customers to continue looking for shorter and more predictable supply chains, early planning for critical components, and automation platforms that provide flexibility for future products and changing demand. Our manufacturing and engineering presence in the US and Switzerland allows us to support customers more locally and reduce some of the risks associated with long global supply chains. Standardization and modularization also will become increasingly important to control cost and lead time without losing the flexibility customers need.

What consumables, equipment and automation advances will influence the plastics decorating industry in 2027?
Tyler: A recent advance in consumables has created opportunities for advances in equipment. In the past two years, advances in inks and print heads – higher-viscosity fluids, longer throw distances and heavier ink lay-down, especially within inkjet – have enabled printing, decorating and marking over larger areas of plastic parts. Plastics are typically contoured, not flat, and they have always posed a challenge for printing. Now direct-to-object inkjet printing is advancing, enabled by these advances in ink and print head technology. Print heads can now jet ink reliably across a greater distance to the part, so it is possible to decorate larger areas and cover more of a product with ink. That has been a massive gain for print equipment makers which, in turn, affects the consumable industry as they make more inks for the new equipment.

EPS has designed its existing equipment for scalability with modular systems to accommodate change. And Epson recently announced Engineered Printing Solutions as their North American distributor for their CONTOURJET, which articulates its print heads up and down around complex surfaces to print to a much larger area of the complex curve of a hard hat, for example, or a dimensional box.

But no matter which type of printing we consider, automation will be a major growth point. It is harder every year to find skilled people to run the equipment that is required to decorate complex objects. Finding ways to automate will continue to dominate for injection molders, and in manufacturing facilities that need to mark a part. Automation comes up in every conversation; “How do I take all of these manually operated machines and cells, and automate them?”

Baker: I expect continued development of recycling-compatible label films, inks and coatings, together with automation capable of handling these materials accurately and consistently at increasingly high production speeds. Vision inspection will continue to become more important, not only for quality control but also for process monitoring and reducing scrap. At the same time, we see in-mold labeling (IML) becoming increasingly integrated into the complete production process. Rather than looking only at the molding machine and IML robot, customers are looking at complete solutions including inspection, stacking, case packing and palletizing. Better connectivity and production data will also help processors understand performance and improve overall equipment efficiency.

How will extended producer responsibility (EPR) and sustainability initiatives influence your product offerings or market targets in 2027?
Tyler: Changes in regulations around sustainability are contributing to more adoption of inkjet direct-to-object printing. Many analog processes, such as screen printing, are generally more wasteful of ink. And spray booths are much less precise than inkjet print heads, causing more ink waste through overspray. We see low-migration inks being introduced; these can open up new packaging markets with food safety regulations, for example. As the country, the world, moves to more regulation, ink manufacturers are doing a good job of giving the equipment providers new solutions. Ink manufacturers have done a tremendous job staying on top of regulation changes.

Baker: I expect EPR and sustainability requirements to continue driving lightweight packaging and packaging designs that are easier to recycle. For IML, this means looking at the complete package – container resin, label film, inks and coatings – rather than considering the label independently. This creates opportunities particularly in thin-wall food and consumer packaging. Our role is to provide automation that can reliably process these new material combinations while maintaining label placement accuracy, part quality, cycle time and overall production efficiency. Lightweighting also makes process stability and precise part handling increasingly important.

YUPO’s Brett Newberry: YUPO has developed IML grades to help brands combat EPR fees. We are working directly with the molders with IML material grades designed to lightweight current containers while increasing the bottle strength for improved drop test results. YUPO also has developed CleanSort, a removeable IML that separates the label/inks from the regrind for a cleaner return regrind. This technology especially is helpful within the PET market that is primarily running clear bottles.

What are you most optimistic about for 2027?
Tyler: Direct-to-object printing. There still is a large market for labels, adhesives and transfer prints, but direct-to-object is going to see massive growth over the next 12 to 24 months. The typical arguments against inkjet direct-to-object printing – “I have to use a label.” “I need a sticker for that.” “Inkjet just can’t reach into that area.” – are falling away. “The part is too far from the print head.” People used to think of two to three millimeters between the print head and the part as the upper limit. Those numbers are changing quickly; we have applications running at distances upwards of 30 millimeters. And we have multi-color print heads on the end-of-arm tooling (EOAT) of six-axis robots that can trace the contour of a unique object with a CAD profile. As that technology advances, it will reshape the way that printing and decorating happens on plastics. It’s exciting to think about what’s going to be possible.

Baker: I’m most optimistic about the continued growth of IML and integrated automation, particularly in North America. Customers are increasingly looking beyond an individual robot or machine and considering the performance of the complete production cell. IML can provide strong shelf appeal while highly integrated automation can reduce scrap, manual handling and cost per part. I also believe closer integration between the mold, injection molding machine, labels and automation will become increasingly important. As an end-to-end solution supplier, Muller can provide product development, mold, IML automation and downstream automation as one integrated solution, while working closely with the machine and label suppliers. This allows us to bring the key competencies together early in the project, optimize the complete production cell and reduce technical risk for the customer.

Newberry: YUPO follows market trends and changes closely. We are at the forefront of development of materials for the ever-changing market. We look forward to assisting brands to meet their sustainability goals and lower the EPR cost while utilizing YUPO IML.

As the market prepares for 2027, the only constant is change. But, those changes will spur plastics molders, decorators and manufacturers to do what they do best – adapt and thrive.
 
For more information, visit www.4mmfg.com, www.pad-printing.com, www.sussexim.com, www.epsvt.com, www.muller-technology.com and www.yupoamerica.com.