Irwin’s Bakery, one of Northern Ireland’s most famous and well-established, family-owned bakeries, knows exactly how important it is to keep up with the times. Founded around 1912 in County Armagh, the bakery has seen over hundred years of innovations and changes and knows exactly how important it is to deliver its range of products the way its consumers like them.
In an industry with a global value in excess of $300bn and 7% year-on-year growth, Irwin’s has to ensure its products maintain fantastic standards. With new regulations such as EU Regulation 1169/2011 and requirements to remain compliant to EuPIA standards, the baked goods industry is in every way fast moving.
With high volumes and short shelf life, products can lose their value quickly and any slowdown in the manufacturing process can have a big impact on the bottom line.
“We’ve picked the right machinery, the best machinery, to meet the needs of the future… we’re able to program, get the speeds, get the quality of print.”
Brian Irwin, Chairman
Changing recipes and shapes of products regularly throughout the day, and in turn packaging artwork and types of packaging. Irwin’s relies heavily upon its infrastructure that it can handle the high volumes as any downtime will have a significant negative effect on the bottom line.
Being required to print important legislative-required information such as ‘best before’ dates and traceability information on such an array of assets, Irwin’s realised that their current infrastructure would become obsolete and unusable in the next one-to-two years.
Proactively tendering how they might maintain delivering their products with world-class printing standards, they considered key aspects of what they needed in their new-and-improved printers. Among them were:
- Flexibility
- Reliability
- Versatility
- Engineering Support
>> Related: Infographic: Changing the Face of Food Traceability
Domino (via its Irish distributor Codico) has been working with Irwin’s Bakery for over 25 years, with one printer on-site in 1988, to over 20 units today. Offering fantastic innovations like Domino’s V230i has ensured reliability by taking the air out of the printing process, enabling a decent quality print from first print to last print.
“One of our strengths as Northern Ireland’s largest, independent plant bakery is our range of products. With that range of products we have to have a high level of flexibility.”
David Holmes, Operational Director
Irwin’s partnered with Domino, David explains, due to their proven reliability and global support network, ensuring consistency even with the next generation of printers. They’re not the only ones either. As a well-founded expert and partner to many in the baked goods industry, Domino places compliance and customer service at the forefront of its’ service offerings.
Find out more about Domino’s place in the baked goods industry in our white paper: ‘Confronting coding challenges in the bakery industry' and make sure to watch the original case study below.
To find out more about Domino’s service offerings, be sure to contact us today through our website, or contact us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Otherwise, to find out more about Irwin’s Bakery, be sure to check out their website, Facebook, and Twitter profiles.