Seeing Orange

When you work for Sunkist, it's pretty important to be able to print the color orange.

That was one of the first things Tim Criswell realized five years ago after he was hired to run the in-plant at Sunkist Growers, in Sherman Oaks, Calif. At the time, the small shop was printing only forms and stationery. Everything that featured Sunkist's five-color logo had to be printed outside. This irked Criswell. He wanted to print that logo.

"That, to me, was easy growth," he says.

So he traded an unneeded collator for a used one-color Heidelberg KORD and went to work. Customers had already had their appetites whetted for color by the shop's Xerox DocuColor 40, so it didn't take long for Criswell to get color printing jobs.

"We just started doing some simpler things for the sales office," he says, such as flyers. The shop's reputation grew.

After a freeze destroyed much of California's orange crop one year and budgets tightened, even more marketing work came his way. Criswell, who doubles as pressman, patiently fed each page through the KORD five times to get the logo right.

And did he ever get it right. His work has consistently won top prizes in the In-Print contest.

Though his two-man shop recently became a one-man shop when his assistant left, Criswell says business is booming. The in-plant printed almost 12 million offset impressions last year, plus another 1.8 million on the toner equipment (compared to a total of just 4.9 million in 1997).

Criswell has been in discussion with a vendor about a wide-format printer and has found new business printing PowerPoint presentations for Sunkist salespeople. Clearly, the status quo is no place for this in-plant. Color printing, Criswell feels, has paved the way to success.

"Boy, if I had to rely on nothing but black-and-white, we wouldn't be here," he says.

—by Bob Neubauer

Tim Criswell printed almost 12 million offset impressions last year on this one-color Heidelberg KORD. That accounts for many of the four-color marketing materials used by Sunkist Growers.