Thomasville, N.C.-based Wright Global Graphics made a $1.5 million investment in an eight-color Mark Andy P5 press to meet the demands of the expanding food and beverage industry. The new press streamlines the label printing and finishing process and allows the company to provide customers with the printed product labels needed to stand out on retail shelves, the company says.

Nomacorc, a Zebulon, N.C.-based producer of alternative wine closures, completed its first full life-cycle analysis study on its flagship Nomacorc Classic+ product. The results show significant improvements across all environmental impact categories between 2008 and 2011, the company reports. Reasons for these improvements include a more efficient product formulation, switching to local raw material suppliers, shipping efficiencies and greater use of renewable energy sources, it says.

Boston-based Emerson Bearing announced its formation of a Brewer’s Division as part of its efforts to supply bearings and related products to the packaging and food processing industries. Emerson Bearing’s Brewer Division features bearings for several key parts of the brewing process: mixing, bottling/canning, seaming, labeling, and any part of the process involving conveyance. The company also hired Mike Quinn as an inside sales representative.

San Francisco-based Oxygenated Products Group conducted taste testing of oxygen-infused and non-infused bottles of water in the New Brunswick, Canada, market. In a blind taste test, consumers selected the oxygen-infused water 61 percent of the time, while 6 percent of consumers preferred the non-infused version and 33 percent stated no preference.

Infor, a New York-based provider of business application software, announced that Infor Business Intelligence (BI) has certified Amazon Redshift from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Seattle, as a back-end data repository. This announcement builds upon the recent launch of Infor BI 10x and further enhances the value of the Infor Sky Vault initiative that leverages Amazon Redshift and Infor Ion to manage big data. With Infor BI, customers gain a set of data management tools that enable them to more easily and cost-effectively analyze vast amounts of data in Amazon Redshift, the company says.