中文There’s a particular kind of magic that happens on a factory floor when a new machine hums to life for the first time. Oliver Alcock, the businessman who acquired Printed Cup Company in Lancashire last year, knows that feeling well.
“I want us to keep investing in that,” he said, talking about the fact that his company actually makes things in Clitheroe. “This machine isn’t just about buying another piece of equipment. It allows us to make more product here, produce it faster, and take on work that would have been much more difficult for us previously.”
The “machine” he’s excited about is a dry offset printing line, custom-built to spec by a manufacturer based in Zhengzhou, China, and installed this September. It replaced the manual setup the firm used to print onto recyclable plastic cups. The result? Output leapt from roughly 280 cups per hour to about 3,000 — a staggering near-1,000% increase in hourly capacity. Let that sink in. What used to take a full working day now takes the better part of an hour.
Francine Kenyon, the company’s commercial director, put it in plain terms: “It’s probably the biggest change I’ve seen in our production operation during my time with the company.” She described how the old process was painfully manual, whereas now “we can put work through at a completely different speed and scale.” For the sales team, it means saying yes to bigger, more urgent orders without flinching.
This is a six-figure investment, but it’s not really about the money — it’s about control. After Alcock stepped in as CEO following the retirement of founders Mark and Jenny Woodward, his stated focus was growth, innovation, and carrying forward the company’s culture. Keeping manufacturing in-house, rather than farming it out, is the thread running through every decision.
The hero product coming off this line is branded printed R-PET plastic cups for cold takeaway drinks — the kind you grab at a festival, a stadium, or a high-street coffee chain. And here’s the part that matters for the sustainability conversation: these are recyclable cups, printed directly in up to six colours, with no need for separate label application. Fewer steps, less waste, more flexibility for bespoke orders.
There’s a quiet lesson here for every small manufacturer watching the giants swallow the market. You don’t beat scale with scale. You beat it with smart, focused bets on the kit that removes your biggest bottleneck. For Printed Cup Company, that bottleneck was manual printing speed. One machine changed the maths entirely.
Alcock isn’t done. “There is a lot more I want to do with the business, and this is another step towards where I believe Printed Cup Company can go.” With the foodservice, hospitality, events, and drinks sectors all in his sights for expansion, that factory floor is going to stay busy.
Sometimes the most radical thing a company can do is simply make more of what it already makes, right where it’s always made it.
Source: Printweek (published 27 October 2026).
