10 Aug 2026
Technology and investment decisions are becoming more consequential and that reality is redefining how strategy is set and investments are justified.
This shift is driving a more deliberate approach to growth, so says Keypoint Intelligence’s 2026 Labels & Packaging Predictions.
It identifies six trends shaping this direction as printing businesses navigate making decisions in an environment impacted by uncertainty.
Digital is no longer a niche or alternative process. Converters are selecting platforms that can handle sustained, high volume workloads alongside conventional methods. As well as flexibility for short runs the emphasis is on throughput, uptime, and seamless integration.
Brands are exerting more influence over print strategies, especially in labels and corrugated. Their expectations now go beyond quality to include speed-to-market, data visibility, versioning, and accountability. When brands commit to digital, converters tend to scale faster.
As digital volumes increase, disconnected systems across prepress, press, finishing, and MIS/ERP are creating operational drag. The priority in 2026 is integration, workflow continuity, and eliminating manual handoffs that slow production - not flashy new tools.
Capital spending continues, but with stricter justification. Projects must solve specific problems such as capacity constraints, labour shortages, or cost pressures. Experimental or "nice-to-have” investments are becoming harder to approve without a clear ROI.
Buyers are evaluating vendors less on standalone press performance and more on how well their full offering works together - hardware, software, consumables, and service. Long-term reliability and cohesion are becoming decisive factors.
Brand owners are rapidly embedding AI in demand planning, forecasting, and campaign management. Converters are adopting AI more cautiously due to operational complexity. This mismatch is already affecting expectations around responsiveness and turnaround times.
2026 is about execution. Strategic decisions are increasingly focusing on whether production floor investments can expand what a business is able to produce by opening access to new job types, shorter runs, greater variability, and applications that are difficult to serve efficiently with traditional processes alone.
That discipline is most visible in how digital adoption - which has entered a more mature phase - is evolving. Printers and converters are now spending less time on what digital makes possible and more time evaluating how it fills production gaps, scales, runs reliably, and cleanly fits into existing operations.
Aiding this is a new generation of cut-sheet and continuous-feed production presses developed for high quality label and packaging applications as well as publishing, transactional print, and direct mail.
Ongoing improvements in printhead engineering and drop control are pushing resolution from 1200 dpi to 2400 dpi and beyond. At the same time, ultra-small droplet sizes - approaching one picoliter - are delivering smoother gradients, sharper text, and more consistent image reproduction.
Ink development is keeping pace with hardware innovation. Modern pigment inks designed for high-volume production offer improved durability and color stability, while specialty inks - such as opaque white, metallics, fluorescents, and security formulations - are unlocking new opportunities in labels, packaging, and product authentication.
Taken together, these advances are redefining the capabilities of digital production print.
Some of these have already been incorporated into Konica Minolta’s portfolio. It includes the AccurioLabel 400 digital label press with its fifth color station and white toner, AccurioJet 30000 inkjet press, powered by patented UV ink technology as well as the AccurioJet KM-1e and KM-1e HD high-definition B2+ UV inkjet presses.
Supporting production consistency are tools such as Intelligent Quality Optimizer (IQ-601) that delivers precise automation, calibration, and color consistency without specialist operator skills, Predictive maintenance (PdM) that helps reduce costly unplanned downtime and the Virtual Service Visit (VSV) remote servicing program that supports hundreds of thousands of connected devices.
The technology is in place to deliver a business winning offering. Talk to Konica Minolta and explore how to define future production with performance not promise.
