Rectangular cans don’t lend themselves as readily to in-line labeling, so these will continue to come preprinted. But round steel cans—both two- and three-piece, for own-brand and contract-packaged product, and in two different sizes—will all be labeled in-line.
Tulip is a contract manufacturer and packager for a variety of meat marketers, among them Austin, MN-based Hormel Foods Co. When Hormel expressed a strong preference for the look of high-gloss polypropylene labels, management at Tulip started looking for equipment that would help them meet Hormel’s wishes. After thorough study, Tulip installed in 1999 a Model 8000 high-speed roll-fed labeler from B&H Labeling (Ceres, CA).
According to Jan Freiberg, corporate technical manager at Tulip, the logistics of stocking large inventories of preprinted empty cans was becoming increasingly difficult and expensive. Constantly changing package sizes and frequent changes in labeling regs were resulting in an increasing stock of unusable empty cans. So a second B&H labeler, a Model 1600, was installed this year. Tulip now can label any of its package varieties on a just-in-time basis. Shown here are cans of Hormel’s Stagg Chili. Either of the labelers is perfectly capable of keeping up with Tulip’s output of 750 cans/min.
PP labels are flexo printed in at least five colors. Currently they’re supplied by a U.S. vendor, but Freiberg says a local supplier is now being sought. (PR)
