How Continental Kosher Butchers reduced its label inventories and time to market

With the need for more than 5 million labels each year, Australia’s largest Kosher meat supplier turned to insignia for an overprint solution that has reduced their label inventories and improved their time to market with new products.

Australia’s largest Kosher meat supplier, Continental Kosher Butchers, provides meats, smallgoods, antipasto, specialty delicatessen items, dried spices and pantry staples to larger supermarkets, smaller retailers, the food-service industry and is now exporting to customers in Asia–Pacific. The company produces over 150 meat SKUs and 50 smallgoods items and prints in excess of 5 million labels each year.

Continental Kosher Butchers has unique labelling requirements due to its rapidly growing product range, ingredients lists, nutritional values and varying weights.

With traditional labels and packaging, Continental Kosher would be faced with having to hold label stock for each individual product. Finding space to store the all the different label stocks would be difficult, not to mention the risk of getting stuck with expensive, unusable labels if packaging or labelling regulations were to change.

The solution

Continental Kosher uses a pre-printed template label and overprints the variable information for each product type, in-house, as each batch is produced. The labelling solution includes:

• Datamax-O’Neil thermal printers
• BarTender labelling software
• Template (overprint) labels with branding and thermal ribbon

The overprint labels are printed for both Continental Kosher Butchers’ range of meats and smallgoods, as well as its new brand, Lewis & Son, which produces smallgoods, fermented vegetables, deli lines and dry goods. An industrial thermal printer is then used to overprint the variable information (product name, ingredients, and nutritional panel) into the remaining space provided.

The outcome

The labelling solution allows for brand consistency, improved efficiency, and cost-savings. Cash is not tied up in holding stock of hundreds of different labels, as Continental Kosher keeps only the template labels which are used across its product ranges.

In-house printing of variable information provides flexibility. Product information can simply be changed as needed and it is easy to delete a product line. This also means there is no label waste; should a product or labelling regulations change, it is just a matter of updating the software label template.

Flexibility and agility

Continental Kosher recognises the role this flexibility and agility has had in helping it remain responsive to its customers and the market in general. Being able to quickly make changes and respond to new product requests has helped facilitate its business growth.

When the meat industry felt the impact of the drought and the high dollar, Continental Kosher expanded into new markets with new products, introducing its Lewis and Son range.

 

Recently Lewis & Son became the first FODMAP Friendly certified smallgoods crafter and has also obtained endorsement from Coeliac Australia with its Gluten Free products. These lines have seen excellent growth in line with customers’ needs.

With its in-house QA department and the ability to put together new product samples easily with its labelling solution, Continental Kosher has the ability to launch a new product line within days, not weeks or months.

The in-house, overprint label solution allows Continental Kosher Butcher to focus on what it does best — its extensive range of kosher meats, smallgoods and health foods — rather than wasting time on packaging and labelling inventory management.

“The strength of the current set-up is flexibility and adaptability of printing in-house. No delay time means no hindrance on creativity or speed to market; enabling a small business to do what small businesses do best,” explained Daniel Lewis, General Manager, Continental Kosher Butchers.

“Using an attractive base label printed by insignia, with templates set up on Bartender software by insignia technicians means we’ve simplified our label inventory with no sacrifice to the visual appeal of the label.”