Edale Brand Guidelines: The Hampshire Carton & Label Press Maker Owned by Canon

A press maker built by acquisition.

Edale is a British maker of flexographic presses for labels and folding cartons, based at Whiteley, near Fareham, in Hampshire. The company dates its press-building to the mid-1940s: it marked its 75th anniversary in 2020, and its history page says it began developing its own label printing machines in 1950. It also says it believes its roots reach back to the 1920s, as the engineering arm of a tobacco company; the same page names that company as Imperial Tobacco in one place and British American Tobacco in another. The present company, Edale Limited, was incorporated in 1972 under the name Edale Investments Limited, Companies House records show.

Edale’s own timeline describes a business built by acquisition. It says the press operation was bought in 1961 by a company called Lonsdale, which subcontracted the building of flexo presses for the Hall Kelly brand; Lonsdale bought Hall Kelly in 1982 and was acquired by Edale the same year, after which Edale grew with modular and stack flexo presses, screen machines and special machines for the medical market. The company says hundreds of its early label machines were sold around the world. The timeline says the present board took charge in 1987, that Edale bought the screen-press maker Fabrint in 1990 and the hot-foil stamping specialist PB&E Engineering in 1991, a period in which the Austrian firm Bruder Henn became a key trading partner, and that in 2009 it moved from Romsey to a purpose-built manufacturing site of about 60,000 square feet in Hampshire.

Two families, two tiers, one new look.

Edale calls itself “The Carton & Label Press People,” and its range is split along those lines. In December 2025 Print Monthly reported a refreshed line-up under two family names: LabelLine, with the FL4e, a 430mm narrow-web label press, and the FL4p, a 430 to 570mm press with optional inline embellishment; and CartonLine, with the FL6p, a 600 to 650mm single-pass folding-carton press that puts print, varnish, embellishment, die-cutting and stripping in one line, and the FL7p, a 760 to 1000mm platform for wider-format or higher-volume carton work. The letters mark two tiers, Essential for day-to-day production and Precision for premium, higher-volume work.

Edale’s website groups its work by technology: flexographic, rotary screen, gravure and inkjet printing; rotary, semi-rotary and flatbed die-cutting; and embellishment that runs from cold and hot foil to cast-and-cure and tactile effects. It says its presses are designed by its in-house engineers at its UK headquarters, and that a Special Projects team takes on bespoke machines, under the motto that if a customer can imagine it, Edale can probably build it. It names Agfa, ABG, Fujifilm and FFEI among its partners, and works with inkjet partners on hybrid digital presses.

The design story changed with the refresh. Print Monthly reported that the renamed models adopt a more cohesive industrial design meant to reflect Canon’s look, so that buyers can recognise platform, tier and intended use. Managing director Lachlan Buirds, hired in June 2025, told the magazine that Edale had aligned the look and feel of its machines with Canon’s while keeping its own engineering underneath; the refreshed range was set for its market launch in 2026. The same report described a run of appointments around the relaunch, including Rob Brown as sales and marketing director and new heads of sales for the Asia-Pacific and EMEA regions during 2025.

How label press makers present themselves.

Label presses are built for converters, the printers who turn reels of paper and film into the labels on bottles, jars and cartons. A narrow-web press is usually a long inline machine: the web unwinds at one end, passes through a row of printing units, often with UV curing between them, then through foil, varnish and die-cutting stations before the finished labels are rewound as a reel at the other end.

The makers present themselves through that machinery. Their brochures and websites show the web path running from unwinder to rewinder, rows of identical printing units, die stations and close-ups of printed label reels, and they describe presses by print width, the processes a line can combine and the materials it can run, from self-adhesive paper to film and carton.

Much of the selling happens in person. Makers run demonstration halls where converters can watch a press run their own jobs: Gallus says its Experience Center in St. Gallen covers nearly 2,500 square metres and also shows partner machines, and Nilpeter listed technology centres in Denmark, the United States, Thailand, India and Brazil in 2019. Gallus asks converters who want a live demonstration to arrange it through Heidelberg’s local sales and service units.

Trade fairs set the rhythm of launches. Labelexpo, held in Brussels for Europe and in Chicago for the Americas, is where many presses are first shown: Nilpeter launched its FA-Line at Labelexpo in Brussels in 2005, according to FLEXO magazine. The makers in this guide range from family companies to subsidiaries of larger press groups, and each guide sets out who founded the brand, who owns it now and what rests only on the company’s own word.

A supplier becomes part of its customer.

Canon came in through the supply chain. On 4 April 2022, Canon Production Printing and Canon Inc. announced from Venlo, in the Netherlands, that they had acquired Edale, Packaging Scotland and the Flexographic Technical Association’s FLEXO news reported. Canon Production Printing chief executive Mick Asada said Edale had supplied the web transport, conventional printing and embellishment modules for Canon’s LabelStream 4000 series since 2018, and the deal would let Canon develop that line further and draw on Edale’s expertise for future products. He said the closer cooperation should help Canon’s ambition to become a major force for digital innovation in packaging. Barker said Edale had been through a period of growth and that the backing of a strong global player would help it continue.

Edale kept its name. The announcement said it would continue to trade under the Edale brand as an independently managed company focused on labels, folding cartons and flexible packaging; owner and chairman Grahame Barker would step down, and managing director James Boughton would lead the business, reporting into Canon Production Printing through its vice president for digital packaging printing, Walter Vogelsberger. Edale’s own history page says it remains a UK legal entity, and its website now carries the line “Edale, a Canon Company.”

For a design guide, Edale shows how a long-lived engineering name can keep its identity inside a larger group while bringing its machines into line with the parent’s look. Compare ABG, which Edale names as a partner, and Gallus, another label-press maker in this collection. For this guide we use a deep navy, a steel grey and a brick red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Edale’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.