Every Leaflet, Every Language, Every Time.
Hunkeler’s integrated inspection, tracking and finishing solution for pharmaceutical leaflet production.
A quiet promise inside every medicine box
Open any pack of medicine and you will find it: a carefully folded leaflet, printed on tissue-thin paper, dense with information in multiple languages, Dosages, Warnings, Contraindications.
It is one of the most information-critical pieces of print in the world. A single broken character or missing accent can put a patient at risk, and in pharmaceutical production, “close enough” has never been close enough.
That is why leading pharmaceutical printers across Europe have chosen Hunkeler’s complete quality platform: Web Inspection WI8, HCP Tracking, and the Hunkeler finishing ecosystem, to watch over every leaflet they produce.
A demanding challenge, met end-to-end
Pharmaceutical leaflet printing is among the most demanding applications in the entire printing industry: substrates are exceptionally thin, text is small and often set in non-Latin scripts, production must run at full speed, because regulatory 100% inspection is not a sampling exercise. And every leaflet requires a complete, auditable trail from artwork to finished product.
Hunkeler’s answer is not a single device but a complete quality chain.
Web Inspection WI8 performs full-surface, pixel-by-pixel verification of every printed leaflet against a validated Golden Sample, reliably detecting defects down to the sub-millimeter range even on the lightest pharma papers. Because inspection is pixel-based, it works equally well on Latin, Cyrillic, Thai, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic scripts, as well as on images and illustrations, in monochrome and/or in full color.
HCP Tracking identifies every leaflet by a unique identifier and follows it through every stage of production, creating the item-level audit trail regulators demand.
Hunkeler finishing equipment: cutting, stacking and folding, integrates natively with inspection and tracking, automatically diverting any non-compliant copy into the reject bin without operator intervention, eventually generating reprints to keep orders complete.
The result is a single, coherent quality environment rather than a patchwork of vendor handoffs.
Trusted by Europe’s leading pharmaceutical printers
Hunkeler’s pharmaceutical credentials are demonstrated daily at two European important and demanding leaflet producers:
August Faller GmbH, one of Europe’s foremost pharmaceutical leaflet specialists, operates more than twenty Hunkeler finishing lines across two production sites, with Web Inspection WI8 on the printing lines and full site-level HCP production tracking connecting everything into a single quality backbone.
Palladio Group, the Italian pharmaceutical packaging and leaflet specialist, runs the same platform in live production and has been a close development partner.
Together, these installations represent thousands of production hours and many millions of leaflets inspected, a benchmark the wider industry is now following.
A complete, auditable workflow
From artwork to finished product, every leaflet moves through a verified digital process:
- The pharmaceutical PDF is imposed, with unique identifiers assigned to each item.
- A control file is transmitted to the HCP Site Manager, the central tracking server.
- During proof printing, WI8 captures the Golden Sample reference.
- Production is authorized only once the Golden Sample has been proven and validated against the original artwork.
- Every leaflet is inspected in real time during printing.
- Non-compliant copies are automatically rejected during finishing.
- Finalized products are checked out at the buckle folder, closing the loop on traceability.
For pharmaceutical quality managers and auditors, this is exactly the kind of closed-loop documentation that turns regulatory inspections from stressful events into routine ones.
