3 things holding up snack manufacturers' production lines

  • By Domino Printing Sciences
  • July 26, 2016
  • Food
  • Snacks
  • Pouches
  • Bags
  • Flexible
  • Bags
  • Vac form
  • labels
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Tried and tested or over the hill?

When it comes to printing and coding on packaging in the snack industry, manufacturers have traditionally relied on tried and trusted workhorses – such as hot stamp or roller coders. Yet these former leaders have been surpassed by digital technologies. And as the demands for unique, regulation-compliant packaging grow, legacy printing technologies are delaying production in several important ways.

1. Line changeovers

With hot stamping the typeface needs time to cool before any changes can be made. Then further time is wasted as the device has to be reheated prior to restart. The total process is rarely completed in less than 5 minutes.

2. Typesetting tweaks

With legacy printing technology, type characters have to be manually replaced for every single code change. Human errors may not occur daily, but across weeks, months and years, it’s inevitable. Products that have been incorrectly coded are either wasted or must be repackaged and reprinted. Either way, it causes delays and adds to production costs.

3. Ink replacement

Ink replacement in conventional printers is cumbersome. Also ink capacity is typically far smaller than with digital printers, adding to production line hold ups.

Is downtime damaging profit margins?

Put it all together and the result is an unnecessarily high level of downtime. Downtime that eats into profit margins. Conventional coding devices have proved themselves reliable for many years, but the demands of today’s snack industry mean that upgrading to digital technology is business-critical.

New alternative technologies can deliver the same or improved reliability, with a flurry of added benefits: increased speed, downtime reduction, automatic changeover of codes, cost-effective consumables and the ability to print variable information onto a wide range of substrates. Change always seems hard. But it could do wonders for your bottom line.           

Get the full lowdown in our white paper here.

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