Holistic approach
a winning strategy

Close on 2 000 Druck & Medien magazine readers voted for the finalists in the Printer of the Year competition, making the award even more special. At the end of last year Druck & Medien’s editorial team compiled a list of 50 nominees, including 10 print shops, based on their achievements. In December, over 2 000 of the magazine’s readers voted online for the finalists in five categories. The results were published on 15 February. “The readers emphasised that Vollherbst practises sustainability throughout the entire process chain,” a statement from the editors says. This includes sustainability from economic, ecological and social perspectives.

Located in Baden, Germany’s warmest wine-growing region, Vollherbst has been using solar energy from panels it installed 10 years ago and recently switched to green electricity. Vollherbst’s core processes were fully digitalised in 2019. This avoids unnecessary printouts and enables employees to work from home. Vollherbst has also teamed up with various partners to develop alternative processes for more resource-efficient print finishing, such as EcoLeaf, and is the first print and labelling company specialising in wine and spirits labels in the world to test this new technology.

In the corporate social responsibility field, Vollherbst supports regional institutions on a project-by-project basis. It recently supplied the elementary school with printers for home schooling and provided the Caritas welfare association in Freiburg with help for the homeless during the Covid-19 pandemic. As a supplier of labels for the wine industry, Vollherbst has focused particularly on hard-hit areas in the wine industry. In South Africa, for example, it launched the Imvini Wethu wine project where all proceeds of the new wine’s sales, amounting to 50 000 euro, will flow back to the country’s wine industry.