FuturePrint Podcast
FuturePrint is dedicated to and passionate about the power of print technology to enable new opportunities and create new value. This pod features deep-dive discussions with the people behind the tech as well as market analysis, trends, marketing and storytelling!
FuturePrint Podcast
#241 Black Magic and Bright Futures: How Cabot Is Quietly Shaping Inkjet's Digital Packaging Revolution
In this episode of the FuturePrint Podcast, we explore the quietly powerful role Cabot Corporation plays in shaping the future of inkjet for packaging. Host Marcus Timson is joined by Lionel Petton, Senior Technical Services Manager, and Susan Hipsky, Senior Regulatory Affairs Manager, for an in-depth conversation spanning innovation, sustainability, and the complex demands of digital print.
With over 25 years of experience in water-based pigment dispersions, Cabot is uniquely positioned as the only inkjet dispersion supplier vertically integrated into carbon black manufacturing. Lionel discusses how Cabot’s dual-technology portfolio, high re-dispersibility, and low viscosity dispersions deliver quality and efficiency for customers. Susan shares insights into Cabot’s leadership in regulatory compliance—particularly in food packaging—and their collaborative approach to supporting global customers through the shifting landscape of sustainability, safety, and transparency.
Whether you’re in ink development, packaging, or print technology, this episode offers a rare glimpse behind the curtain at a company delivering essential innovation—often unnoticed, but absolutely critical.
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Welcome to the Future Print Podcast, celebrating print technology and the people behind it.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the latest episode of the Future Print Podcast. I'm really happy to have with me two people who are based in two different continents, and they're both from two different continents. Um, we had leonard peton, who is I believe, based but he can explain more uh somewhere in france, and susan hipsky is based somewhere in the us and she's going to explain where, when when introducing both. So, welcome both to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, marcus happy to have you both with us. I'm gonna have an interesting conversation as I learn a lot more about Cabot. It's the first time we've recorded together. First off, Lionel, if you wouldn't mind sort of giving us a bit of a background and introduction in terms of your experience so far with Cabot and the world of printing.
Speaker 3:Sure, so my name is Lionel Pétain. I'm the Senior Technical Services Manager at Cabot for a couple of years now. In the Injet division of Cabot, I actually have global responsibilities. I'm supporting our customers globally for all the technical needs or new developments, also with ongoing projects, and I make the link between the customers and our technical team, which is based in the US, to make sure that they have the right product and also that we work on the right projects for the future. I'm not sure that I can say that myself.
Speaker 2:And where are you located? Are you in France?
Speaker 3:somewhere. I forgot that. Yes, so I'm working in a home office and I'm based in the west of France, in a nice region of Britain.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. Yeah, I've never been, but I hear it's a fantastic part of the country. So thank you for that, leonor Susan. So you're we've already established based somewhere in the US, which is fantastic. And yeah, please, if you don't mind, giving us an introduction to yourself, your experience so far and what it is you do for Cabot.
Speaker 4:Yeah, thank you so much, Marcus. So yeah, I'm Susan Hipsky and I am a Senior Regulatory Affairs Manager at Cabot, which is a position inside our Corporate Safety, health and Environment group and also part of our Product Safety and Toxicology team, and I have been here for 29 years and supported our inkjet business since its inception that long ago and it's been exciting to support that product line and watch it grow and expand and succeed. So, yeah, so I am in the US. I'm associated with our headquarters office in Boston, massachusetts.
Speaker 2:Fantastic, brilliant, yeah, the great thing with Inkjet. You've been around 20, well, you've been there 29 years, been seeing the beginning, and it still feels like it's a fresh, vibrant, young technology, doesn't it? Yeah, it has been around 29 years, but you've obviously seen a lot of positive development in that time. So, yeah, anyway, welcome to the podcast, great to have you both with us. The best thing to start really is with the big picture, I think. Obviously, cabot has been a leader in water-based inkjet pigment, a leader in water-based inkjet pigment dispersions for over 25 years, as you say. Um, what would you say has really sort of driven this sustained success? And obviously just for people that perhaps not necessarily um fully immersed in in inkjet and inkjet ink development, um, like leonard, what are first dispersions? Could you explain that a little bit, and why has Cabot really been so successful in that space?
Speaker 3:I think it's at the core of what Cabot is as a company. Right, cabot is everyone on the Cabot for the carbon, black fume, metal oxides as well and of course, in Injet also for our dispersions. But the core of what Cabot is doing is just, it's really particle science. It's working with particles at modifying, so playing with the structure of particles, modifying the surface chemistries of particles. This is where we're coming from and actually when EngJet really started, like 25, 30 years ago, when it really started to grow as a business, cabot already had some solutions which could be applied.
Speaker 3:So one main challenge in inkjet is really to produce an ink which is very stable, and you have competing demands. It must be stable. At the same time, when it's coming onto your substrates you need it to kind of crash very quickly. You also need to have a lot of flexibility in how you formulate your rings, and the way the technology that Cabot has developed has allowed us to also follow the market and to also support our customers in formulating very flexible systems. So I think this is why we've been there for a long time and I believe we'll be there for quite a long time still in the future in Inkjet.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. So thanks for that and I guess, with that in mind, sort of 29 years, all that experience and the importance of this part of the chain in terms of innovation, is something that isn't necessarily something people are always aware of, but it's absolutely integral. Obviously, you give talks, leonardo and so on, and, and then valencia coming up and some of the previous, um previous future events, your, your presentation title mentions cabot's unique position as the only inkjet dispersion supplier that is vertically integrated into carbon black manufacturing. Why is this vertical integration so?
Speaker 3:significant for customers. It's important because obviously the black is one of the important colors. I will not say that the colors are not, but the carbon black is really a key pigment which is used in EngJet and it also is slightly different because of its structure, of the way that the particle is presented, so it presents different challenges in terms of stabilization of the system and the fact that we are vertically integrated gives us a unique chance to really select the right grade for our applications so we can really tune and make sure we have the right product for the application and to have the optimum performance for our customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's quite a compelling characteristic, isn't it, Susan? I know that's something that you can expand on there.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, I think it's important to add that, in particular from a regulatory perspective or food packaging perspective, being vertically integrated with our carbon black manufacturing has enormous safety advantages. A big concern with carbon black used in food contact-related applications is the potential for presence of trace amounts of substances known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which can have adverse health effects under certain conditions and exposures. And as a carbon black producer ourselves, cabot has a rigorous internal testing program where we manage product quality and ensure that certain grades that are intended for food contact applications meet, and usually exceed regulatory requirements for PAH content. So for our RingChat product line, this means we have much greater control over the carbon blacks being used in our black dispersion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's something that's fairly unique to you guys and I think that sounds like a really something that people need to understand and perhaps find out more about. So tell us a bit about's called cab ojet. Um, it's a dispersion portfolio, which which obviously then sounds like a I know, a flagship solution. Could you explain what these dispersions really stand out? What makes these dispersions stand out, especially in the context of packaging and digital print line?
Speaker 3:Yes, sure. So I would say we have, first, the broadest portfolio of dispersion in terms of technologies in the market. We have, on the one hand, our surface modified dispersions. These are based on, really, the technology which was pioneered by Cabra 25 years ago. With this technology, actually, you actually will bring some charges at the surface of your pigment and, through electrostatic stabilization, you will make sure that your pigment is stable, that you have no flocculation and side effects like this, which you really don't want to have in inkjet. At the same time, they will be compatible with a wide range of ingredients and they will give you a lot of options in how you can formulate your system. And also, next to this technology, we also have our encapsulated polymer dispersions, which are also giving differentiation so that we can also adapt in function of the exact application.
Speaker 3:Is the customer using a primer or not? What type of substrate is being used? What type of printhead? So it really depends. Sometimes it also just comes down to the preference of the customer itself that they might have been more used to work with certain type of ingredients, that they might have been more used to work with certain type of ingredients and one or the other might be more suitable for the application, and this is very important because this means that for most cases, we have a solution that our customers can work with to make sure that they have more performance for their application.
Speaker 2:Okay, brilliant. And so I guess, with that in mind, really one of the key technical advantages you have presented before and will be in the future is the high redispersibility and low viscosity of Cabot's dispersions of print and operational efficiency. So you know, maybe again for non-sciencey people explain a bit about high redispersibility and low viscosity. They're quite difficult to say and I've done it twice now. Are you impressed?
Speaker 1:yeah, so yeah, tell us a bit about that high redispersibility and low viscosity so the redispersibility is a key feature um of of our of our dispersions.
Speaker 3:The redispersibility actually is the way where the pigments when it is dried. So we're only active with water-based systems. So when water is evaporated, if you have a layer of the product on your substrate, it's the way, the possibility to bring it back into suspension just in presence of water, the liquid or the cleaning fluid or the ink composition that the customer is using. This is very important for the printhead, for the shelf life of the printhead and to avoid things like clogging and losing printheads. So in terms of operational efficiency, this is really a key property of our products. Because if you do not have that, what could happen is that when you stop printing, for example, you could have a product drying at the nozzle of the printhead. It will clog and if you cannot get this product back into suspension, you will end up with a lost printhead. So the best-case scenario is that you can do some cleaning operation. You can recover it. Worst-case scenario is that you cannot recover it at all and that you're looking at a change of the printhead which generates a very high cost on top of the productivity which is lost because you cannot operate your printer when you need it.
Speaker 3:So this is this is actually a key, a key feature, and this is also extremely important because if you look at packaging packaging you, the way you look at it it's really an industrial application and if you compare it to, maybe, with office printing, the speed at which you print is much higher, so any downtime is really a problem. You want to use your machine as much as possible. You also have much more print heads. You're also talking about single pass, so if it fails somewhere, you will see it and you can really get quite a loss in terms of lost products through loss of quality. But that's very key. And the viscosity is important because it gives you also some room to maybe use ingredients you could not use otherwise, to use maybe some binders, which would give you some adhesion and the properties you need in your ink. So these are really some of the advantages of our product.
Speaker 2:yes, yeah, yeah, that sounds really compelling. So, with that in mind, I guess the next question is at the top of mind. That seems to be a pervasive one and a very important one, susan, I'd like to bring you in here really. So sustainability is obviously a huge concern in packaging today, isn't it, and will continue to be. How does Cabot's approach to pigment dispersion support environmentally friendly or sustainable practices in the print industry?
Speaker 4:Yeah you know, I really like this question and I'm proud to say that Cabot, as an organization, has invested so much in sustainability for the past several years. Now, our sustainability team has tripled over the past few years and we continue to prioritize work towards goals and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, energy and water usage, improvements in product sustainability and continued focus on several other sustainability pillars. With regard to our inkjet business, we're especially focused on the importance of product transparency, because one of the really important and necessary aspects of success in sustainability for the digital ink market and, in particular, food packaging, is sharing needed information up and down the supply chain. And we do take protecting confidential business information extremely seriously, but we do find ways to share information with our business partners by simply using non-disclosure agreements, working closely with them under contract.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's about being open where you can and providing people with the access to understanding how the product's made and how it's come about and so on, which is, as you say, a really incredibly important thing going forward to avoid. Well, for the customer to know the investment being made is thoroughly thought through. So, yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:Obviously, you emphasize regulatory compliance, which is obviously relevant to sustainability as well, health and safety and so on, and support across global markets. Could you share a bit about how Cabot collaborates with customers to navigate you know this complex world of food contact regulations, because it's not all the same in every single country and it's it's kind of a bit of a complex map and to navigate through, isn't it?
Speaker 4:Yes, it sure is. It's quite complex and diverse across several countries. So you know, I'd say, at Cabot Inkjet, the collaboration has always been a central way of working with our customers for home, office or specialty media. Our expertise in pigment dispersions has helped customers meet global regulatory requirements, including chemical inventory compliance, and reach registrations Within the larger Cabot organization. As a global leader in carbon, black and fume metal oxides, we've built deep experience in food contact regulations and I'd say now, as we expand our color dispersions into the food packaging market, we're excited to continue this spirit of collaboration.
Speaker 4:We work closely with our entire supply chain, our ink formulators and their packaging converters, and down to the brands, to ensure success in product safety and regulatory compliance, with the focus on product safety where that's really the fundamental aspect of the regulations in this area.
Speaker 4:But you're right, like the regulatory landscape can be very complex and difficult to navigate, especially when it comes to food contact material market and one of I guess, as an example, one of our customers who was developing really innovative inkjet inks for digital presses.
Speaker 4:One of their challenges was ensuring those inks met indirect food contact regulations, in particular concerning impurities or these substances known as non-intentionally added substances or NIAS.
Speaker 4:So us, as their pigment dispersion supplier, we worked hard to become their trusted partner in compliance, helping them in a few ways.
Speaker 4:For instance, we provided really in-depth analysis of our pigment dispersions to help provide full transparency and compliance with the food contact regulations, and we have a dedicated technical and regulatory team that worked with them and together to address compliance with key global and industry standards and if you're sort of in the food packaging market, you'd be familiar with these, including, like the United States FDA, the European Union EFSA regulation framework, swiss ordinance, the Nestle standards, the EUPIA Printing Inc Association standards, other frameworks like Council of Europe AP89.1, german BFR and several others.
Speaker 4:So we really worked hard to listen to our customers' specific needs and help them with things even like migration testing and substance identification. And in addition to that, I feel like we did do some even above and beyond work where we worked with external consultants to complete risk assessments for our specific dispersions in our customers' specific applications, just to make sure we were comfortable with product safety and compliance. So we feel like working closely with our customers in these ways ensures the safety and quality of their ink and the customer's packaging and reinforces everybody's commitment to consumer safety, yeah, brilliant.
Speaker 2:And I guess the fact is that, working with you guys, you're tapping into a huge bank of knowledge, experience, which I guess gives people a lot of comfort in the sense that they're risking their investment, they're avoiding problems. And, yeah, nobody wants to launch a product that doesn't comply in one country but in another it does's hugely, uh, hugely risky and, um, a bit of a disaster. So that kind of knowledge and expertise that you have, and actually not only that, the commitment and culture I think as well really to to collaboration, which is which is a big thing, isn't it? In the world of inkjet and I'm sure as well in the world of packaging, is that, um, you know, to be a partner with expert. You know technical expertise, which is, in essence, what you're saying there, you know? Could any more examples you might be able to give of, of that partnership in action, kind of building on what susan said, leon?
Speaker 3:yeah, I think, um, well, this technical expertise and this collaboration, I think, is crucial. Yes, we, we have, I think, examples. We're not on a daily basis, but what we're saying is, if you look at Inge, due to the complexity of the whole process, it's impossible to do this in a vacuum, so you really need to partner with people who have the expertise. Our expertise is in the colloidal science, in the particle science, making sure we have the right product, the color as well the regulatory parts, like Susan mentioned. But, at the end of the day, when you look at the whole system, you also need the engineers building the system.
Speaker 3:You also need to look I don't know at the substrates, at the printhead where the ink is being jetted, and all of this needs to come together. And that's really the importance because, um, we can do a good thing on our side, but, yeah, if this doesn't fit with the need of the machine or the process of the equipment, then we will get an issue in the end. Right, I think that's that's one of the of of of the, the challenge, but at the same time, it makes it very interesting and I think we have they're really an expertise where we can really support our customers and making sure that they have the right product for the right application. And that's especially true in packaging, where you have different type of substrates, you have different requirements and there's still a learning curve there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you're always learning each time, I imagine, and to get the best possible fit for the job. I'm sure it's not fully standardised in that way, is it so fascinating stuff?
Speaker 1:So looking really ahead.
Speaker 2:The world we live in now is very much a fast-moving one and fast-changing and so on. And what kind of trends do you see shaping the future, perhaps, of digital printing for packaging specifically? And how does Cabot really sort of plan and prepare to stay ahead of them, Because anticipating change is something that is really helpful, isn't it in terms of innovation and product development and so on? So, yeah, looking ahead really. What trends do you feel are the ones that is really helpful, isn't it in terms of innovation and product development and so on? So, yeah, looking ahead really. So what trends do you feel are the other ones that are really shaping the future of printing for packaging?
Speaker 3:I think. I think, uh, printing for packaging, if you look in general, is still, for a big part, analog, so I think there's still a huge potential for for digital printing. You should look at it. Um, how we're preparing for it is making sure we have the right products, and that also that we deepen our application understanding, because packaging is not just one type of topic. You can go from corrugated to folding carton to flexible packaging. These will all have very, very different requirements in terms of adhesion to your substrate, for example, in terms of color performance, the colors you're gonna use or the targets for your guns. So these are all things that we are trying to be, I think, as flexible as we can to make sure that we can offer the best solution depending on the exact needs of the customer.
Speaker 2:In summary, it's about being adaptable and flexible. In terms of that, what?
Speaker 4:about you, Susan. Sort of trends for the future.
Speaker 4:Yeah, there is always a steady stream of of things on the horizon. I think some of the things in particular that we're monitoring and watching that that might have, in particular might have direct impacts on food packaging requirements are our regulations concerning microplastic. Our regulations concerning microplastic, also forever chemicals such as the PFAS group of substances. There's also been a lot of activity in the recyclability of plastics and other materials and in the difficulties that some pigments present to recyclability of those materials. And then also there's been quite a bit of activity, at least in the US, with extended producer responsibilities.
Speaker 4:So those are kind of some examples of some of the emerging issues that we've become aware of, and it can get pretty challenging to stay ahead of all these things. And for us I think we're fortunate because at Cabot, since we are a global producer, we have a presence in all of the kind of major regions and we also supply into a pretty diverse set of product applications and markets. So for those reasons we feel like we are pretty well connected to watching these important things that are on the horizon. And in addition to that, we are leading members in certain industry trade groups like, for example, for carbon black silica and also colored pigments. So there is a lot to do and a lot to pay attention to, and I know we're working hard to do our best.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think what you said there is important, isn't it Staying connected, being involved in the industry. You know, obviously you're very engaged with us at FuturePen. You talk to your eyes at events, you're very present, you share content and it's much about people understanding and learning what you're talking about. But equally the other way around, right, it's a continual learning process, I think, isn't it, leon? Yeah, isn't it?
Speaker 4:Leon, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:Well, brilliant. Thanks so much for joining. I've learned a lot myself, actually, about the importance of the kind of work you're doing in terms of the larger picture, in terms of digital print, packaging and, I guess, all of the issues, both regulatory, both sustainability, and as well as health and safety and so on. I think that's been a very sort of eye-opening conversation. So, thanks so much for joining us and looking forward to your talks at future events in the near future. So, yeah, nice to have met and talked to you both.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much, Marcus.
Speaker 4:Yeah, great, thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe now for more great audio content. Coming up and visit futureprinttech for the latest news, partner interviews, in-depth industry research and to catch up on content from Futureprint events. We'll see you next time on the Futureprint podcast.
