Yansefu Inks and Coatings, a leading ink manufacturing company in Bawal, Haryana, offers a wide portfolio of high performance printing inks, coatings, polyurethanes and adhesives for gravure and flexo applications. The company exports its printing inks and adhesives to customers across the globe including Nepal, Nigeria, Bangladesh and UAE. Yansefu is consistently maintaining a CAGR of over 80-100% every year. Currently, the company produces about 12,000 MT material annually including printing inks, coatings and adhesives.
For its high-end research and analysis work, the company owns a state-of-the-art analytical laboratory with all the necessary analytical instruments and equipment including Pyrolyzer – GC-MS, GC, GPC, FTIR and Centrifuge. At present, Yansefu has more than seven patented products, which stands testimony to the dedication and time Yansefu devotes in research work to design innovative products.
During our visit to Yansefu Inks and Coatings, we spoke to JK Sharma – CEO, Yansefu, India; and Neelakamal Mohapatra – vice president, R&D and innovation at Yansefu, India, who gave us insights about the challenges in the supply chain and about Yansefu’s business strategy. Here is an excerpt from the interview:
Mahan Hazarika: What is Yansefu’s strategy for growth in India?
JK Sharma: Yansefu has been focusing on three aspects for its growth in India – compliant inks system, barrier coatings and water-based technology.
Compliant inks system: As a responsible ink manufacturer, we welcome the new norms of food safety regulations for food packaging implemented by FSSAI. Consequently, we are not just ready with our wide range of compliant ink systems designed in accordance with various food packaging regulation and new packaging regulation of the country but also educating our customers, brand owners and consumers by organizing seminars to increase the awareness about food safety as well as providing technical assistance to them.
Barrier coatings: To reduce the plastic pollution and increase the recycling rate, India government has been taking steps to reduce plastic wastes. The government is also creating awareness at various forums to develop such laminated structures which can be easily recycled. To support the government, many packaging manufacturers and brand owners are taking several independent initiatives, and also looking to find the alternatives of plastics used in multi-layer packaging structures which can protect the food articles from external contaminants as plastic materials do, but can also be easily recycled. Therefore, Yansefu has developed such barrier coatings which provides excellent protection to the food articles from environmental contamination without reducing the quality and shelf lives of products. Moreover, Yansefu has been devotedly working to formulate such innovative and high performance products for new packaging materials that could be used in place of single-use plastic. We have recently procured high end WVTR and OTR equipment to facilitate research in development in this area.
Water based technology: Currently, various converters raise their concerns over the use of solvent-based inks since the production costs increases due to the use of costly solvents which are used in place of aromatic hydrocarbon-based solvents such as toluene. Additionally, they are concerned about fire hazards while using solvent-based inks. In such cases, water-based inks are considered to be more eco-friendly and economically better than solvent-based inks. Unfortunately, this field has not been explored much till now. However, the stakeholders in supply chain has begun to find safer alternatives in place of solvent-based inks but they hold back in making a shift towards water-based technology due to the lack of machinery and technical support required to make the desired shift. In this case, Yansefu proactively supports customers with its innovative water-based products and technical guidance. Our established water-based ink series – Sarjoaqua and Sarjoflex – are now running with more than 300 meter per minute in both gravure and flexo machines.
Mahan Hazarika: How does Yansefu ensure that their products are safe for end-user applications?
Neelakamal Mohapatra: Together with providing innovative and cost-effective solutions to our customer, product safety is the major goal of our organization. Yansefu proactively analyses its raw materials such as resins, pigments, additives, photo-initiators prior to the usage in any formulations using complex analytical techniques to ensure whether the raw materials which are being used to formulate the inks are compliant. Not only that, before launching our products in the market, we also conduct the complex migration analysis such as worst case calculation, migration study with simulant and food as well, to ensure that our products are safe to use for end-user applications.
Yansefu ensures that its products comply with the national legislation for food packaging such as standard IS 15495:2004: First revision (revised draft in 2019) and other various applicable regulatory requirements. We have a wide range of premium and compliant products including printing inks and adhesives. We also provide the Declaration of Conformity post performing complete evaluation of our products.
Mahan Hazarika: What challenges are you facing in India and what are you doing to tackle them?
JK Sharma: The major challenge is to convince small and medium-sized stakeholders to make transitional shift from toluene-based to toluene-free inks and solvent-based inks to water-based inks. Currently, stakeholders of small and medium enterprises (SME) have limited knowledge about food safety laws and regulations. As a result, they misinterpret the concept of food safety and go wrong in making required changes as per the new regulations.
We are making constant efforts to help our customers and brand owners to comply with the new food safety legislation by organizing seminars on product safety and regulations for food packaging to increase the awareness about food safety among them. We also provide technical assistance and support to our customers in order to manage their manpower and machinery to achieve optimum results while converting from toluene-based ink to toluene-free ink and other technologies with ease.
Mahan Hazarika: What impacts or challenges are you facing after China government has shut down chemical industries in China?
Neelakamal Mohapatra: The prohibitions implemented on China’s chemical industry by China government to strengthen the pollution norms, has resulted in the shortage in supply of chemicals in the market which led to a significant increase in raw material prices. Undoubtedly, it is challenging to fulfill customers’ requirement on time without compromising the quality of our products. But, we are looking forward and working to turn these challenges into opportunities. For instance, raw materials like chlorinated polypropylene (CPP) used for extrusion lamination inks are either not available, or available at a high price. Therefore, we have designed a patented CPP and toluene-free polyurethane-based inks for extrusion lamination with excellent properties. Similarly, Yansefu has a wide range of high performance innovative products. We are constantly working to develop innovative products to support our customers to deal with the varying norms and laws by government and regulatory bodies without hampering their business growth.
Mahan Hazarika: What steps have you taken to strength your production facilities?
JK Sharma: Yansefu makes continuous efforts to uplift its manufacturing process to develop world-class products. To cater to the increasing requirements of the customers, Yansefu has expanded its production facilities a few months ago. To prevent any cross contamination, several storage tanks have been installed to store raw materials and intermediates distinctively. These steps also accelerate the rapid manufacturing process of the products. Yansefu has designated areas and equipment to manufacture different shades and varieties of printing inks. Likewise, designated reactors to produce high performance polyurethanes. Additionally, a couple of multipurpose pilot reactors have been installed to execute complex scale-up procedures in order to develop state-of-the art resins or binders and adhesives of newer chemistry.
Recently, we have advanced the grinding process of pigments and conducted a study in collaboration with a Japanese group. The company not only reduces the pigments size to nano-meter range but also stabilizes the grinding process. The purpose to elevate the grinding process is to serve the premium quality ink solutions.
Mahan Hazarika: Can you give us a brief about your readiness to the new food packaging regulations of the country?
Neelakamal Mohapatra: We are absolutely ready for the new food packaging regulations with our wide portfolio of safe and compliant printing inks, varnishes, coatings and adhesives which are formulated in accordance with national printing inks standard IS 15495: First revision (revised draft in 2019) and various other regulations.
We have been proactively participating in the meetings of joint committee of BIS which are organized to either draft new or modify the existing standards and regulations and strongly propose our suggestions regarding the food and product safety in a manner that would be beneficial for the entire supply chain and consumers as well.
Mahan Hazarika: What is the USP of your company?
JK Sharma: We manufacture in-house high-end polyester-polyols in accordance to the applicable compliance which is further used for designing safe products such as tailor-made polyurethane binders, inks and adhesives such as water-based, solvent-based and solvent-free adhesives. This aids us to cater to customers’ requirements with great dexterity.
