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Controls technology leads to breakthrough in PTI-compliant marking

This Florida grower and shipper looked high and low for an automated method of marking palletized cases of produce. Finally, it built its own.

Viewed from the side, the pallet is in the central station of the three-station FireTag system; infeed is to the right and discharge to the left.
Viewed from the side, the pallet is in the central station of the three-station FireTag system; infeed is to the right and discharge to the left.

What’s a poor produce shipping and growing company to do when the coding and marking system it needs isn’t available in the marketplace? Develop its own, of course. And then, for good measure, it spins off a technology arm to market its new invention.


That’s pretty much what happened when management at Wishnatzki Farms—based in Plant City, FL, they’re the largest producer and shipper of strawberries in Florida—decided they needed a better way to put a PTI-compliant mark (see sidebar) on palletized produce. They call their ingenious device FireTag.


“Nothing available in the marketplace could handle palletized cases,” explains Rob Ogilbee, CFO of VirtualOne, the Wishnatzki Farms-owned technology division set up to market and sell FireTag. “A number of solutions were available for in-line labeling of individual cases as they pass by. But we have a lot of products that come in from the field already palletized. The pallets go into a centralized cooler facility and come out when it’s time for them to go out to the retail channel. It just didn’t make sense to break down that pallet, execute the PTI-compliant identification, and then rebuild the pallet.”


And so it was that FireTag was born (see video at www.bit.ly/pwe00430). It features a camera-guided laser system mounted on a servo-driven three-axis carriage that burns a GS1-128 bar code plus human-readable information that is all compliant with PTI guidelines.


Essentially the system consists of three stations, the first of which is an input station. Here a scanner reads a pallet’s bar code. This bar code, applied to a pallet when it enters the centralized cooler facility, contains several key pieces of information:
• 
GTIN, or Global Trade Item Number (this number identifies the product’s identity, such as “large green peppers”)
• 
the kind of box the product is in
• 
the number of containers on the pallet
• 
the lot number.

The camera scanning the bar code is networked to an Advantech PC in the system’s touchscreen that coordinates with the Yaskawa PLC responsible for motion—i.e., conveying the pallet onto the turntable, turning the turntable, and moving the carriage on which the laser coder is mounted. The PC also interfaces with the laser coder so that the correct GTIN and lot # get printed on the boxes. The PC also determines, depending on which GTIN is in the bar code, how many boxes are stacked on the pallet and the precise location of the spot on which laser coding is to be done. In other words, the PC “tells” the laser what information to print and where to print it.


Data exchange

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