Customer case: Yves Schoenmaeckers from Omniprint

As Yves says, “In recent years, I have seen many smaller printing companies fail due to small profit margins and cut-throat competition from large online printing companies. To differentiate Omniprint, we started focusing on personalising printing. Many printers have opinions on this; ‘That’s not important enough, we just want to print the big print runs’. I got into it nonetheless because I noticed that several larger clients were showing increasing interest in personalisation.

During the corona pandemic, a lot of print orders disappeared in one fell swoop, since advertising agencies and event agencies in particular are among our customer base. We were lost for words. How long would this situation last? Contrary to expectations, we actually saw an increase in the number of orders from Foodbag, one of our regular customers.’

It started with a few copies

‘Foodbag is a Belgian company that delivers meal boxes to people’s homes. Customers can choose three to five meals from a range of 30 for delivery to their home each week. The customer chooses how many portions of each dish should be delivered. The owner had a design firm, but wanted to go in a different direction. He began cooking meals at home for his neighbours and friends. One day, he came to my print shop and asked me to make some copies of an A4 sheet of cooking instructions. No problem at all, of course. That small company has grown to become a major Belgian player in the meal box home-delivery market. And we grew along with them.’

Printing of more than 250 different menu combinations

‘Foodbag customers receive a personalised booklet in their meal box containing their chosen recipes. We started personalising those booklets a couple of years ago. We did that on a smaller scale back then than we do now. We used Printshop Mail from Objectif Lune, a great choice to start with. But when we wanted to increase the personalisation, we switched to another product from Objectif Lune: PlanetPress Connect. We receive support in this from Dialog Group.

We are responsible for the fully automated layout of Foodbag’s menu booklets. From the personalised cover, the name and address information on the back and the dishes chosen to the number of dishes and the number of people per dish. Do the math on how many different combinations are possible. No two booklets are the same. We need to make sure that all menu booklets are correct. Fortunately, we have Dennis Kleijne from Dialog Group to help us with that. Without Dennis, there would be no booklets. Dennis adds flexibility. He knows when everything needs to be finished and doesn’t complicate things unnecessarily. He’s always thinking along about how we can make the process smarter and more efficient.’

The production process starts with the personalised menu booklet

Yves: ‘The personalised menu booklets are important to Foodbag’s production and delivery process. If we don’t get it right, the process goes haywire. The first operation in the Foodbag production line is to scan the bar code of a menu booklet so the production line knows which and how many ingredients to put in the box.

If we have to print, say, 6,000 booklets, there are about 200 different routes that Foodbag maps out to deliver the meal boxes. All those booklets have to be in a certain order in the system and printed. That has to be exactly right, because the driver does not want to stand at a customer’s door and have to grab the bottom box from the pile.
In line with expectations, I think the number of booklets we have to produce will increase and we will have to increase our production capacity partly because of that.

Yves Schoenmaeckers

Eigenaar Omniprint