‘Bowl’ trays and compartmentalised trays are an increasingly common sight on supermarket shelves. While these shapely new designs add shelf appeal, they’re causing headaches for the sleeve coding operation, according to Richard Pether, director at Rotech.
“It’s straightforward enough to apply best before dates and traceability codes to a sleeve wrapped around a rectangular tray that’s being transported past the coder via a conveyor with good side guides,” he said. “However, with more awkwardly shaped packs, the chances of presenting the pack and sleeve squarely to the coder can be slim. Getting the coder into the correct position can also be difficult, as shaped packs tend to have difficult-to-reach areas.”
The RF2 friction feed overprinting system enabled the manufacturer to code the sleeves offline and bring them to the production line already printed.
Engineered specifically for the food industry, the RF2 uses Rotech’s stack-to-stack feeding technology to pick sleeves from a stack, accurately print date or batch codes and place the printed sleeve neatly onto another stack for collection, all at speeds of up to 400 per minute.
The manufacturer in question had taken an order from one of the multiples for 3,000 units of a new product that was packaged in a tub with a cardboard sleeve. It was applying date codes using an existing inline inkjet system, but because the code was positioned in a difficult-to-reach spot at the bottom of the sleeve, the line had to be slowed down to make sure the code was applied accurately.
“Essentially, the coding operation had become a bottleneck because the coder was having trouble printing at an angle just a few millimetres above the conveyor,” said Pether. “It kept misfiring and spraying the belt rather than the product. This was not only limiting line speed, but also resulting in packaging waste.”
Pre-coding enabled the manufacturer to deactivate the inline coding system, increase line speed by 30% and code the 3,000 sleeves in a matter of minutes.
“By removing the coding operation from the critical path, line efficiency was restored and waste eliminated,” said Pether.
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