Martin's makes ink and coding concerns disappear

Thermal-transfer printers on baggers at Martin’s snacks improve legibility and accuracy, lower labor costs, and provide coding flexibility.

Pw 8777 2 Printhead Film

Compared to multinational snack brands, Martin’s Potato Chips is a small operation that turns out an array of bagged salty snacks including popcorn and, of course, potato chips. Snackers in the Northeast U.S. count on Martin’s, while Martin’s counts on four side-by-side vertical form/fill/seal machines that produce a million bags of snacks monthly. Yet those workhorse baggers are no less critical than the coders that print information on each and every bag. If the coders, which are mounted on the backside above the film infeed web, are stopped for any reason, the bagger is stopped, and output stops with it.

Martin’s had printed its bags using contact coders since the early 1990s. These required operators for every product change to redo the metal typeset, a process similar to Benjamin Franklin’s day as a printer in nearby Philadelphia. Along with the time required for typeset changes, accuracy and readability had been a growing concern as wear and tear accumulated over time.

The printed message was prone to smearing, the ink took time to dry, and it would sometimes leave marks on the forming tube that could smear on the packaging film, according to Martin’s vice president of operations Glenn Zearfoss. Also, each coder could be expected to break down about three times weekly, he adds.

More than four years ago, Martin’s installed Videojet (www.videojet.com) Data Flex thermal-transfer printers on two of its baggers at its 75,000-sq-ft facility in Thomasville, PA. These units began coding improvements that would be completed four years later.

“The company looked forward to improving reliability with the Videojets,” says Zearfoss, who notes the main improvements:

 Accuracy. “Our date coding is always correct because it’s programmed into the coder itself—no one can pick the wrong number to put in the date code.”

 Print flexibility. “We have complete flexibility to print, larger or smaller, whatever we want.”

 Real-time coding. “The time of day is printed and can be used to trace packaging. We can look at the bag code and tell exactly which bagger and which operator.” Before, Martin’s was limited to a shift code, which could sometimes run as long as 10 hours, making precise tracking difficult.

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