中文Every industry has its Oscars night, and for India’s label sector it happened on October 30, on day two of Loupe India 2026 at the India Expo Centre & Mart in Greater Noida. The LMAI Heidelberg – Gallus Label Awards 2026 handed out trophies across an eye-watering number of categories – flexo, letterpress, offset, combination, digital, screen, rotogravure, booklet and multi-layer labels, plus innovation, sustainability and jury awards.
But read past the winner list and the real story emerges. Because who kept winning – and how often – tells you exactly what kind of company thrives in this market right now.
Start with the sheer breadth of the competition. Categories spanned Flexo Line, Flexo Colour Process, Flexo Wine & Spirit, Letterpress Line and Screen, Offset Colour Process, Combination Printing across several flavors, Digital Printing, Screen Printing, Rotogravure, Booklet & Multi-Layer Labels. That’s not ceremony for ceremony’s sake. It’s a map of the techniques Indian converters are actually using to win brand business – and the fact that combination printing and digital each earned multiple categories says the market has moved decisively beyond “one press, one trick.”
Then look at the names. Any Graphics swept an astonishing range of categories – Flexo Colour Process, Letterpress Line & Screen, Letterpress Wine & Spirit, Combination Line & Screen, Combination Colour, Combination Wine & Spirits, Digital Printing, Digital Wine & Spirit, and Screen Printing. That’s not a company that happens to run good equipment. That’s a company whose entire production philosophy is built on versatility – the ability to take a brand’s brief and pick whatever print technology serves it best, then execute at award level across all of them.
Spirited Labels, true to its name, dominated the wine and spirit categories while also collecting Flexo Line, Letterpress Line and multiple combination awards. Holostik India – a name long associated with security holograms – walked away with the Innovation Award, the Green Sustainable Award and the Jury Award, a triple crown that says security, sustainability and craftsmanship can live in the same business plan. Pragati Pack (India) took both offset categories, Mudrika Labels claimed flexo and rotogravure wins, and Total Print Solutions, Aakruti Multipack, Renault Paper Products, Canpac Veritech Solutions, Skanem India, Eugen Printing And Packaging and Sel Jegat Printers each earned their place on the podium.
Notice a pattern? The big winners are converters that invested across multiple print technologies rather than betting everything on a single platform. In a market where brand owners increasingly split work – long runs on conventional presses, short premium runs on digital, security features wherever the risk demands – versatility isn’t just nice. It’s the entry ticket to the awards table, and more importantly, to the high-margin end of the customer roster.
The sustainability angle deserves its own spotlight. A dedicated Green Sustainable Award, won by a security-products specialist, signals that environmental credentials have moved from marketing nice-to-have to judged, competitive criterion in the Indian label market. Global brand owners importing sustainability mandates into their Indian supply chains are pulling the whole ecosystem up with them, and awards like this make the progress visible – and the laggards conspicuous.
There’s also something quietly strategic about where the awards happened. Announcing winners in front of the Loupe India crowd – thousands of converters, suppliers and brand managers wandering the halls – turns the ceremony into a live advertisement. Every converter sitting in that audience thinking “next year that could be us” is a converter thinking about upgrading a press, adding a finishing unit or hiring a better prepress team. Awards nights, at their best, are industry investment engines disguised as dinner parties.
For the LMAI – the Label Manufacturers Association of India – and sponsors Heidelberg and Gallus, the 2026 edition confirms their event has grown into the definitive benchmark of print craft in one of the world’s fastest-growing label markets. And for anyone outside India wondering whether the country’s label sector is all volume and no finesse, the answer is now on a trophy shelf in Greater Noida: the finesse is here, it’s multiplying, and it’s winning in more categories than ever.
The winners’ full list is published by Labels & Labeling, and it’s worth a scroll – not just to see who won, but to see what winning looks like when a market is scaling as fast as India’s. Spoiler: it looks versatile.
It’s also worth noting what the award structure rewards that press spec sheets never measure: consistency. Judging across this many categories means a single lucky label can’t carry a converter to the top of the table. Any Graphics winning in flexo, letterpress, combination, digital and screen simultaneously means the quality control, color management and prepress discipline behind those wins are systematic, not situational. That’s the actual lesson for every converter studying the results – the trophies are downstream of process, and process is something any determined business can copy.
Source: Labels & Labeling – “LMAI Heidelberg – Gallus Label Awards 2026 winners announced” (October 31, 2026).
