中文Matt Mimmo, founder of the innovative carton-print business AMR Hewitts, has passed away peacefully, surrounded by his wife, Rose, and his family. His story is deeply woven into that of the packaging operation he built: from humble beginnings, he grew the company with vision, determination and an unwavering commitment to its success, laying the foundations on which AMR Hewitts continues to grow today.
AMR Hewitts serves clients in the pharmaceutical, food and beverage industries — sectors where carton quality, security and regulatory compliance are non-negotiable. It was the first business in Australia to introduce aqueous coating, and it developed a range of enhancements including pearlescence, holographics, hot and cold foiling and braille. Its security-printing options spanned colour-shift technology, micro-printing, holograms and coin-reactive inks, and the company held patents for several of its carton-printing innovations.
The business was inducted into the Victorian Manufacturing Hall of Fame for Sustained Manufacturing Excellence and won the Heidelberg Australia Award for Excellence in Craft. Four years ago, as the Mimmo family looked to exit, AMR Hewitts became part of the Peacock Group, one of Australia’s largest print and packaging businesses. The company recalls that beyond his business achievements, Mimmo ‘will be remembered for the person he was — his warmth, generosity, character and genuine connection with people left a lasting impression on everyone who had the privilege of knowing him.’
Mimmo’s career is a useful reminder of how much packaging print innovation has historically come from independent converters willing to experiment. The introduction of aqueous coating in Australia, and the early adoption of foiling, pearlescence and security features on folding cartons, were not headline-grabbing launches but quiet capability bets that differentiated a regional converter in demanding pharmaceutical and beverage supply chains. Those capabilities are now table stakes in high-security packaging, but someone had to prove them viable first.
The broader arc — an independent pioneer built over decades, then absorbed into a larger group — is also representative of the Australian print and packaging sector’s consolidation. As scale, capital and compliance demands grow, many founder-led businesses reach a point where a trade sale to a group like Peacock secures continuity for staff and customers alike. Mimmo’s legacy is therefore twofold: the technical firsts, and the durable company that outlives its founder.
For the industry, tributes like this also mark a generational handover. The craft knowledge behind carton security printing — colour-shift inks, micro-printing, coin-reactive features — lives in the people who perfected it, and the sector’s challenge of transferring that expertise to the next generation is well documented. Remembering pioneers such as Mimmo is partly about honouring the past and partly about noticing what expertise must be captured before it walks out the door.
Source: Print21 (https://print21.com.au/vale-matt-mimmo/).
The tribute also underscores a quiet strength of the Australian packaging sector: a deep bench of independent converters whose craft knowledge built the capabilities the majors now scale. As those founders retire or sell, the risk is not only lost personalities but lost craft — the tacit understanding of how to run colour-shift inks or micro-printing reliably at volume. AMR Hewitts’ survival inside the Peacock Group is one answer to that risk; deliberate knowledge transfer programmes are another. Mimmo’s story is a prompt for the industry to ask, for every pioneer still working, who is learning what they know before it is too late. The cartons on the shelf will outlast the people who perfected them, but only if the knowledge is passed on.
For the Australian packaging industry specifically, Mimmo’s passing marks another step in the transition from founder-led independents to group-owned scale. That transition brings capital, resilience and broader capability, but it also places a premium on deliberately preserving the craft that distinguished the originals. The Peacock Group’s stewardship of AMR Hewitts is a template: keep the name, the capability and the people, and let scale extend what the founder built. As more independents reach succession age, the sector’s task is to ensure that the technical firsts pioneered by people like Mimmo are not just acquired but actively carried forward by the next generation of operators and engineers who may never have met him.
In remembering Mimmo, the industry also remembers what founder-led innovation looked like before consolidation: a person with a vision, a press, and the willingness to try a coating or a foil nobody else in the market had attempted. That spirit is harder to institutionalise than it is to admire, yet it is precisely what keeps a sector moving. The best tribute is not only the obituary but the deliberate effort to teach the next generation the craft that pioneers like him turned into capability, so that the cartons keep getting better long after the founders are gone.
Mimmo’s legacy, then, is twofold: the patents and firsts that advanced Australian carton print, and the durable company that carries them forward. As the industry marks his passing, the more useful act than remembrance is to ask who today’s pioneers are entrusting with their craft, so that the next transition preserves capability rather than losing it to time.
