FDBusiness.com

Take a look in the print room of many of the UK’s biggest food producers and you’ll find an offline coding and labelling system from coding specialist, PrintSafe. These compact machines quietly handle awkward printing and labelling jobs that otherwise hold up production.

For smaller companies launching into the major retailers, these offline systems are an affordable alternative that offers big savings over hand coding or stickering.

Tricky Sleeves

Ready meals, sausages, deli foods, desserts – these popular products are often packed in trays or tubs with a cardboard sleeve. And sleeves can be troublesome when coding online, with print sometimes delivered outside the correct area.

UdaFORMAXX high-speed carton and sleeve coding and labelling system.

With an offline system, sleeves can be printed with date and batch number ready for production. Sleeves are loaded into a stack and then fed automatically past an integrated printer – typically inkjet, thermal inkjet or thermal transfer. With throughput up to 600 per minute, it is a viable alternative that eliminates wastage and cost.

Promotional Labelling

By their very nature, promotions are time limited and applied to different products at different times. A standalone system gives companies the ability to label different lines on one machine. Switching between batches is easy and labels are applied in the same place each time.

Multiple Product Lines

It is not just sleeves that pose a coding challenge. Cheese company, Long Clawson Dairy uses an offline coding system for its famous Stilton cartons. Site Manager, Mark Ursell says: “For me, the issue is the number of different lines that need coding. Packaging specifics mean we can’t always code inline. The PrintSafe table-top system sits in our low risk area and we use it to code a wide variety of packs.”

Find more information at www.printsafe.co.uk/offlinecoding.