Domino, a provider of coding and marking solutions, has enhanced productivity for Orchard House, the UK supplier of food and drink products, by installing its latest printing equipment technology.
Orchard House has recently expanded its range of products to incorporate prepared fruit salads for the growing snack-food market as well as continuing its existing fresh fruit drink collection. And the recent growth has given way to a series of new production equipment and facility updates, which has included new printing equipment.
The company has two sites based in Corby, Northampton - one producing juices and smoothies and the other dedicated to preparing and packing a range of own-label fresh fruit products and salads. Both factories are using Domino's newly launched inkjet printers to date-code products. The juice factory is running six production lines using Domino's efficient A300 machines to code onto paper labels and directly onto plastic caps.
The fruit production process, taking place at the second site, is highly intensive, with most processes being carried out by hand to ensure an even and high quality distribution of fruit per catering pack. Because of the demanding nature of preparation, Wayne Penny, Engineering Manager at Corby, needs to have reliable automated processes wherever possible which means that the packing, sealing and labelling systems have to be completely reliable.
"Our four Domino inkjet printers are running constantly," Penny said. "They are installed on-line to code best-before and use-by dates on pre-printed labels before they are stuck onto the sealed film lids at the end of the filling and packing process."
Penny claims that the printers have proved reliable and that he is confident that they will be able to meet future increases in productivity.