中文Ten years is a long time in packaging — long enough for a startup to become infrastructure. ePac Flexible Packaging has marked its tenth anniversary, and the numbers tell a story of how thoroughly digital printing has rewritten the rules of flexible packaging.
Founded in 2016 with a single manufacturing facility, ePac has grown into a global network serving thousands of customers across North America, Europe, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. Twenty-plus facilities on four continents is not the trajectory of a cautious niche player. It is the footprint of a company that bet early and bet hard on digital.
The bet was simple but radical: target consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands that need low minimum order quantities and fast turnaround times. Traditional flexibles manufacturing was built for enormous runs — the economics only worked if you printed millions of the same pouch. ePac flipped that, building a model around HP Indigo digital print technology that enables on-demand production. The pitch to brands is that this reduces obsolete inventory and minimises waste compared with conventional production. For a small brand launching a flagship product, or a big one rolling out nationally, that flexibility is the entire value proposition.
Under the hood, the whole network runs on the ePacOne platform, which routes orders across more than 20 facilities worldwide. That matters more than it sounds. A brand in Sydney and a brand in Chicago can both get fast, consistent output because the work flows to whichever plant has capacity and the right materials. It is a manufacturing version of the cloud — compute wherever it makes sense.
As it enters its second decade, ePac says it is accelerating investment in high-barrier materials, sustainable film options, expanded production capacity and next-generation digital print technology. In other words, the things that have always held digital flexibles back — barrier performance, film sustainability, sheer throughput — are exactly where the money is now going.
Virag Patel, CEO and co-founder, frames the mission in deliberately inclusive terms: “From day one, ePac was built to empower brands at every level. Whether providing low-minimum agility for a startup’s flagship launch or high-capacity production for a global enterprise’s national rollout, we remove manufacturing constraints so our partners can focus on scaling their business. Our best years are ahead of us.”
That last line is worth taking seriously. A company does not talk about its “best years ahead” at a tenth anniversary unless it believes the market is still early. And in digital flexible packaging, that may be true. Brands are under relentless pressure to customise, personalise and shorten supply chains, and digital print is the only technology that bends to those demands without punishing small runs.
The broader lesson for the industry is that ePac’s success was never really about a machine. It was about a business model — distributed, software-routed, low-MOQ, fast. The HP Indigo presses made it possible; the ePacOne platform made it scalable. A decade in, that combination has built something rivals are still scrambling to copy.
Source: Labels & Labeling — “ePac Flexible Packaging marks tenth anniversary” (20 August 2026)
