The bakery industry, one of the most diverse and exciting food sub-sectors currently, has been experiencing steady growth over the last few years. The global packaged baked goods market shipped 318 billion units in 2015, resulting in a 3% growth on the previous year and bringing its worldwide value to $339 billion. This is expected to rise to $421 billion by 2020.
However, with industries experiencing significant growth, both infrastructural and legislative challenges can be a burden, putting a strain on resources. In an industry optimised by high volumes and a short shelf life, it’s integral that producers streamline their processes or face a significant impact on their bottom line.
The challenges production managers face
With a wide range of products which often require different types of packaging materials, including flexible, cardboard or rigid plastic, production managers need to be able to adapt their lines ready to process the next batch of goods. Breads, cakes, and biscuits all have their own type of packaging, including flexible (bags, flow, pouch, vacuum form fill and seal), cardboard and rigid plastic, with the data that needs to be printed varying from item-to-item.
In turn, due to a large number of product variants and high line usage, managers can see significantly decreased line availability limiting production capacity and heightening the opportunity for errors to be made.
Maximising productivity and profit
Managers need to ensure that uptime is maximised. With production typically running around the clock, any downtime – planned or otherwise – can have significant effects on overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and profitability, due to the lack of spare production capacity.
Technical failures and human errors are the most common causes of stoppages in a production environment and with coding requirements now going far beyond simply including safety and traceability information, there is a far greater chance for errors to be made. Intermittent requirements such as promotional codes for marketing campaigns and short-term price changes, production managers need to have an infrastructure that can accommodate such needs now and into the future.
Thanks to today’s leading technologies, manufacturers are now able to benefit from round-the-clock production with innovations such as increased ink capacity, single point message creation through specialist software, or ribbon economy.
As such, bakery producers have a responsibility to choose the coding solution that’s most appropriate to their packaging lines as it has such a significant impact on the production process and, in turn, the bottom line.
Discover how you could streamline your processes while supporting, US and EU regulations that impact your business. Domino has the experience in the bakery sector doing just that. Trust the experts.
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