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QuickFresh Automates Nutrition Label Printing

This prepared meal delivery company improved flexibility and throughput with a full-color variable printer for cartonboard sleeves.

The Markoprint integra PP 108 can achieve speeds of up to 150 meters/min at a resolution of 360 dpi.
The Markoprint integra PP 108 can achieve speeds of up to 150 meters/min at a resolution of 360 dpi.

In less than one year, QuickFresh, a Utah-based food delivery service, has been able to grow and scale its business exponentially. When the company first opened in May 2021, it was delivering its freshly prepared meals locally. In November 2021, the company expanded its delivery area to the entire West Coast. Now, QuickFresh delivers ready-to-heat prepared meals to the lower 48 states.

Still in its first year of business, the company’s meal packaging process is mostly handled manually. Once the food is manufactured, it’s placed in a tray, which is then sealed and wrapped with a paperboard sleeve that carries the meal’s nutrition information.

But the process of getting the nutrition label and meal information onto the sleeves slowed throughput and created a bottleneck. QuickFresh had four operators printing off stickers that were hand-placed, one by one, front and back of each sleeved tray. A labor-intensive process isn’t ideal during a nationwide labor shortage. Not only was the process tedious, it was also prone to human error. The printer has a circulating ink system that removes air from the nozzles to ensure a clean print image.The printer has a circulating ink system that removes air from the nozzles to ensure a clean print image.

Meanwhile, QuickFresh needed to be poised for even more rapid growth. Josh Rookstool, Director of Operations at QuickFresh, began to look for a solution to help the company scale and improve throughput and the quality of its product’s package and labels.

“We needed a better solution that was scalable, saved us money, and helped to automate things where we could,” Rokstool says. “We posed the challenge of, ‘how can we get to a point where we can take these nice [paperboard] sleeves, wrap them around the meals, and have a printing process that can add all of the variable information?’” Rookstool says.

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