Making a mark on the egg carton industry

A fresh egg producer was searching for an ope­rator-friendly marking system to work 15 hours per day, marking its egg cartons with best-before dates and batch numbers. The company chose LEIBINGER’s advanced JET2 NEO CIJ printer.

Founded in 1980, DAGU is a poultry compa­ny based in Guadalajara (Spain). Over the years the company has evolved and today it’s part of the HEVO Group which produces over 70 million dozen eggs annually and employs nearly 500 people, 40% of whom are women.

Luis Alberto Sanz, Production Mana­ger at DAGU and member of the association since 1990, highlights the operation: “Our cooperative’s facilities are state-of-the-art throughout the entire production process. We meticulously select raw materials, manufacture the best feed for our animals and produce eggs of the highest quality.”

The company’s farm-to-fork traceability system enables it to keep permanent track of the farm of origin and the laying date of the egg. However, it needed a marking system to work 15 h/day, marking 200,000 egg cartons per batch with best-before dates, farm information and batch numbers. Depending on the carton, different imprints were required. Another requirement was that all printers could be managed from a single PC via VNC (virtual network computing).

DAGU opted for an advanced solution from LEIBINGER’s official partner in Spain — Lusaro MarkColor, S.L. — and now has 16 LEIBINGER JET2 NEO printers installed, one at each exit of the egg graders.

“We greatly appreciate the high flexibility in printing different packaging formats and the simple, centralised operation of the printers. Service, delivery of consumables and coordination of all requests are ideally covered by LEIBINGER’s local partner Lusaro MarkColor. The collaboration is excellent,” Sanz said.

Supports on which the electric actuator and the LEIBINGER JET2 NEO are installed were designed, which resulted in flexible support for the different carton formats. A PC was placed on top of the sorting machine from which all the printers are managed via VNC. The project was initially commissioned in 2020 and DAGU now has 16 LEIBINGER JET2 NEO printers installed on its Moba sorters.

Source: DAGU S.A.

The JET2 NEO provides a continuous inkjet (CIJ) solution for all standard coding and marking applications. The printer ensures fast performance combined with low energy and solvent consumption. It features LEIBINGER’s Sealtronic print head technology, which is designed to minimise downtime and maximise productivity.

Sanz is delighted with the performance of the LEIBINGER printers: “We would definitely recommend these high-quality LEIBINGER printers to other companies who have similarly high requirements in terms of quality, productivity and reliability.”

Images sourced: DAGU S.A.