At Labelexpo Europe ’25, GEW Inc’s Vice President, Sales, Amir Dekel speaks to Greg Hrinya of Label & Narrow Web magazine. Amir and Greg discuss a variety of things during the interview, including which products GEW are debuting at the show, the difference between air and water cooling, how UV LED helps converters meet their sustainability goals, and what GEW’s Research and Development team are developing for the future.
Scroll to read the interview below, or click here to watch the video interview:
Greg Hrinya (GH): Hello and thank you for joining us for our newest videobite. We bring you the latest news and products in our industry. I’m Greg Hrinya, Editor of Label and Narrow Web. And it’s a pleasure to be joined today by Amir Dekel, Vice President of Sales at GEW, live from Labelexpo Europe here in Barcelona, Spain for the first time actually. So, there’s a lot going on at the GEW booth this year and I wanted to catch up with Amir so that we could go through the products and see what trends are impacting label converters today. Amir, thanks so much for joining us.
Amir Dekel (AD): Thank you, Greg. Thanks for having me.
GH: Absolutely. So, Amir, to start out, what are some of the products that GEW is highlighting this year?
AD: So, we have a full, whole range of new things going, coming in this year. You could see if you walk through our booth the newest thing will be our DoseGuard which is a way to measure the output of a lamp and it could be an offline device or it could be an online device. So you can dynamically measure and evaluate the quality of your curing in terms of irradiance and dose. At the same time we develop our newest OxyGuard. This is a way to inert the curing environment and prevent oxygen from prohibiting the cure. And in this way you can use a lot less photo initiators and become a lot more sustainable in food-grade or graded material.
And then our new range of the #two. This product which are essentially giving a lot more power, which entails better speeds, more throughput, better production speeds, and all that within the encapsulation of our traditional cooling systems, either by air or by water, and we will talk about that a bit later today. Yeah, you led me into that perfectly.
GH: So curing’s a huge topic in the industry today. Air cooling, water cooling, what are the differences? What are the benefits? Can you take us through that?
AD: Yeah. So, um, with air cooling, you essentially bring the temperature of the lamp down to a certain degree and there’s that much air you can pull through in order to bring it to that temperature that you want to keep it.
GH: Yeah.
AD: But the higher the temperature is, the more abuse our LED is suffering or lamps are suffering. So, you have to control it. With water-cooled, essentially, today we got to a point where LED lamps provide exactly the same power as our conventional lamp. So, LED nowadays in our, with our technology, essentially reach a level of conventional, right? So, you can get, you can get throughput and production speeds same as you did with your traditional conventional UV.
GH: That’s really great. And I mean curing is such a big topic today as I mentioned before. Sustainability is also one of the big topics in this industry. How does your new technology impact sustainability and what trends are you seeing there?
AD: Right. So we, almost every person that come to this booth at some point brings us to the point, you know, I got big brand customers and they ask me all the time about sustainability. And our answer is very simple. You go LED and by going LED you reduce your power by 50%, your carbon footprint reduces dramatically and all the pollution or heat that you radiate to the air is reduced and then you become a lot more sustainable and, you know, some of the big brands like Walmarts, as an example, they grade their vendors by how sustainable they are and, the thing is, the more sustainable you are the more business you get from companies like that. So the biggest trend is moving to LED, and you can see it in this show by the way Greg, if you walk through our OEM partners, all of them you will see our GEW system and they all LED and if you just go back one year to the show in Chicago it was exactly the opposite. So it’s a oneway highway.
GH: That’s good to know about your partners. Speaking about your booth, what are some of the feedback that you’re getting specifically for the new products that you told me a little bit about before?
AD: So, people are dazzled, you know, guys that came and said, you know, I wanted to run 200m per minute or about, you know, 5 600 feet per minute, they could not do it before. Now, they can do it easily. You know, especially people they’re going a little wider like the 26 inches guys that want to run sleeves or flex packaging and they don’t have die cuts and all the other processes that slows down the machine. They are very excited about that. They say, “Wow, you know, that’s what I wanted. That’s how how it can run fast and make some money.” So, and all that and maintaining sustainability. So, kind of everything is ready to go.
GH: That’s fantastic. And as far as GEW goes, what can we expect in the future?
AD: Oh, we got a whole range of things. In fact, yesterday I was, the day before yesterday, we had our meeting with our agents and Rob Rae, you know, the General Manager / Managing Director of GEW, he came in and one of the guys asked what GEW is happening for the future, or planning for the future? Rob told him listen we spend £2 million, that’s a true number, 2 million pounds on 20 people in our Research and Development department are working now on our next generation. I’m not going to give you the exact details, because I’m not allowed but it’s dazzling, it’s a totally new project, concept of product, a lot more modular, a lot more self installs, higher power, a lot of flexibility in mixing conventional and LED technology. It’s going to be exciting. Labelexpo next year, be ready.
GH: That’s fantastic and we’re really looking forward to it. Thanks so much for joining us today, Amir.
AD: Thanks for having me, Greg.
GH: Absolutely. If you’d like to learn more about GEW, head on over to their website.
AD: Thank you.
Watch the interview here
Learn more about AeroLED2, here.
Learn more about OxyGuard here and DoseGuard here.
Find the original video on the Label and Narrow Web website, here.