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Egg marketer hatches an improved coding scheme

New ink-jet marking systems for egg cartons—both molded pulp and EPS foam—bring savings to Hidden Villa Ranch and add flexibility in adapting to future needs.

Pw 7976 Hvr1

A new and versatile ink-jet printing system from Matthews Marking Products (www.matw.com) is saving Hidden Villa Ranch’s largest egg processing facility $1,000/mo in labor and operating costs. It’s also giving this rapidly growing Southern California food company the flexibility and reliability it needs to meet future requirements.

HVR has four egg-processing plants. With an output of 10,000 dozen eggs/hr, the San Jacinto facility is the largest. Specialized Selecta egg graders on 10 lines, bought by HVR for $3 million each seven years ago, were originally equipped with mechanical date coders to print two lines of information: the USDA plant number and the sell-by date expressed in both month and date in Julian form on the end of each egg carton. HVR packages graded eggs in both pulp and expanded polystyrene cartons, in 12- and 18-egg sizes.

“For the first five years, these mechanical coders were OK,” says Ron Petersen, HVR’s plant manager at San Jacinto. “But we began having lots of problems after that. Finally, when the cam action wore out, we had to replace them. It was going to cost $2,700 each to replace 10 coders. It didn’t make sense.”

Instead, Peterson chose new ink-jet systems from Matthews for all 10 lines. Each system consists of an I-Mark™ SX-32 controller and a 16-valve 3000 Series Midi Drop-on-Demand print head. HVR was, in fact, among the first customers to take delivery of the new SX-32 ink-jet system. Matthews also supplied a fast-drying (1 to 2 seconds) ink, the SCP901A acetone-based ink, which has the added benefit of being a VOC-free formula.

Programming the ink-jet system is done using a simple icon-based user interface. And the total price was not much more than buying new mechanical coders.

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