Packaging for fresh food requires speed and reliability

Taking delivery of fresh salads direct from growers, packaging in see-through retail packs for supermarkets and other retailers and then despatching for arrival in fresh condition for retail shelves as ready-to-eat is a highly disciplined operation.

Certain vegetables, for example salad leaves such as lettuce and spinach, can be particularly sensitive to delays, thus making the performance of machines on the packaging line critical.

At Vegco’s large processing plant, located at Bairnsdale in one of Victoria’s southern area vegetable growing districts, is a major processing and packaging facility for fresh food. Recently it embarked on trialling some new equipment to upgrade the printing process for shipping cartons.

“The trialling occurred when we recently had cause to start a new line to cater for an expanded demand,” said Chris Bongers, Supervisor at the packaging plant. One of the new pieces of equipment we needed was a carton printing machine to apply the variable information onto our preprinted cartons - a printer that could meet our needs of speed and, most important, reliability.”

Vegco decided to evaluate a new supplier for this application and Tronics was chosen.

“What attracted us [to Tronics] was the simplicity and certainty as well as the confidence they had in their machines, so much so that they offered to install two of the machines on a trial basis.

“In fact, they delivered two different machines for trialling, but we soon identified the preferred unit, a Videojet 2300 series. Tronics was happy to leave it on trial. This gave us time to truly evaluate the unique features of the new Videojet 2300 case coder system,” explained Chris.

What Vegco found over the trial period were a number of advantages, when compared with other carton printers at the Bairnsdale plant.

“There were about four major points that were noted with the Videojet unit,” said Chris.

“First, was no mess. Videojet is self priming and requires no regular cleaning. We are a food manufacturer so cleanliness is essential on the production floor.

“We found the interface very easy to use. We simply select the desired message from the screen prompt, press print and it works. Operators learned the system very quickly. Unlike our other printers, we could see on the screen what was to be printed on the carton.

“It is very easy to adjust print size and adjust for a change in carton size. The process is far simpler, as well as quicker. Saving vital production time, we can now focus on our production, not case coding.”

“Daily maintenance is no longer an issue for us. There are built-in features that save us time, compared with the other printers. Once again more production time, that’s what we needed.”

Chris went on to explain that their other machines could run out of ink requiring re priming - a messy process that could result in a delay of about 20 minutes.

“Our Videojet won’t let this happen. It tells you when the ink is low and automatically prevents de-priming,” explained Chris.

The ink system is solid state, eliminating potential downtime from maintenance on pumps, solenoids and other moving parts.

Printing is a 180 dpi resolution for alpha numeric codes, bar codes and graphics with print height up to 70 mm and maximum speed, for alpha numeric text up to 132 m/min.