After more than four decades in commercial print, Middle East Press — one of the Arabian Peninsula's oldest print houses — has crossed into folding-carton packaging with a complete production line: a Bobst die cutter, a pair of refurbished Jagenberg folder-gluers, and a Heidelberg foil stamper, delivered as a single turnkey project.
Middle East Press was established in 1972 and operates from facilities in Jeddah and Riyadh. The company built its reputation in commercial offset printing — business literature, advertising and marketing materials, newsletters, posters, catalogues — supported by a bindery operation that handled what commercial print demands.
The move into packaging
Packaging is a different discipline. Where commercial print ends with cutting and folding, packaging begins with die cutting, gluing, and finishing — three capabilities that don't exist on a commercial print floor. For a commercial printer like Middle East Press to cross into folding cartons, those three capabilities had to arrive together. They couldn't be acquired one machine at a time over a series of years without leaving the operation half-finished. The move had to be one decision, executed as one project.
Three capabilities, three brands, one partner
The new packaging floor was built around three machines, each handling a distinct stage of folding-carton production. A Bobst die cutter at the front — flatbed die cutting is the heart of any folding-carton operation. A pair of fully refurbished Jagenberg folder-gluers in the middle — flat blanks turned into finished cartons. A Heidelberg SBD Starfoil Proline at the back — gold-embossed and metallized finishes for premium packaging.
The project behind the machines
A packaging line is not a stack of machines. Each piece has to fit the floor it's going on, the substrates it will run, the operators who will run it, and the maintenance ecosystem that will keep it running. The project covered every layer: identifying the right machines on the global market, negotiating the buys, organizing the freight from Europe to Saudi Arabia, installing the line at Middle East Press's Jeddah facility, commissioning each machine, and training the operators. Middle East Press received a working packaging line — not a delivery of crates. The same partnership runs alongside Middle East Press's commercial offset floor, where the Manroland Roland 704 and Baumann pile turner that anchor day-to-day production also came from allaoui.
