FEATURE PACKAGING CODER CURRIES FAVOUR WITH PAKORA PRODUCER


Rotech’s user-friendly RF Lite TIJ (thermal inkjet) coder is improving the efficiency and quality of P.K.Foods Glasgow’s coding operation


and the price had to be right. It is pointless buying a machine that can offer additional functions that are not required in the future, the Rotech machine was just perfect in size, functionality and cost,” said Stevenson. An initial encounter with Rotech’s RF Lite sleeve coder convinced him that this might just be the system he was looking for. The RF Lite takes flat cardboard sleeves


R


otech’s RF Lite TIJ (thermal inkjet) has become an “invaluable part of the


process” at P.K.Foods Glasgow, having transformed the efficiency of the pakora producer’s coding operation. The user- friendly coder has enabled the business to meet the lead time expectations of its expanding supermarket customer base. “This machine has been fantastic. It has


slipped into our operation and become an invaluable part of our process. It is hard to imagine how we ever managed without it. Coding used to be slow, painful and labour intensive. Now a single operator can run off 5000 sleeves in just two or three hours,” said Jason Stevenson, sales director and partner at P.K.Foods Glasgow. For the last six years, P.K.Foods Glasgow


has grown by 10-15% year on year, driven mainly by contract wins to supply national supermarkets. The family business is now producing a large volume of authentic Indian snacks from its 5,000 sq ft facility. Despite the now large scale of its operation, P.K.Foods Glasgow still adheres to its original ethos of producing by hand from high quality ingredients. Whilst making everything by hand


results in an authentic and premium product, it precludes the introduction of any sort of ‘in-line’ processes. This is true of the date coding operation, which was performed manually. “We were having to employ staff who


just hand-stamped all day. When we started to win more and more business with national supermarkets, this became too inefficient and time-consuming,” re- called Stevenson. P.K.Foods Glasgow visited the PPMA


show, armed with some sleeve samples, to see some machines in action. The company had already decided it wanted a TIJ coder, on the basis that the cartridge- based technology is clean, compact and cost-effective. “We were looking for a desktop coder that was compact and simple to use –


22 SEPTEMBER 2018 | PROCESS & CONTROL


The RF Lite takes flat cardboard sleeves from a hopper, feeds them through an inkjet printer so they can be date- coded, and stacks them again ready for use


The superior print quality has led to an improvement in clarity and a reduction in sleeve waste – formerly, with the manual handling and printing, one in every 10- 15 sleeves would end up smudged or damaged


from a hopper, feeds them through an inkjet printer so they can be date-coded and stacks them again ready for use. It can handle a variety of sleeve shapes and sizes and only takes seconds to swap between sizes without special tools or training. The RF Lite’s linear speed is 60m/s, which means it can handle just under 200 x 300mm sleeves per minute or around 250 sleeves at 200mm. P.K.Foods Glasgow trialled the RF Lite for


two weeks before committing to buy as they wanted to be confident of the coder’s performance and of staff acceptance. Stevenson said: “You can have the best


machine in the world but if staff don’t buy into it, you won’t get good results. All our operators found the RF Lite to be easy to use; they had no trouble switching between different sleeves and calling up the correct expiry dates for each customer.” Coders can have trouble with code


positioning and quality when handling different sleeve thicknesses and materials. Thin, light sleeve materials in particular can be problematic for systems that use a ‘push’ or ‘shuttle feed’ mechanism. The design of the RF Lite overcomes this potential feeding issue; sleeves are stacked vertically in a hopper, where friction wheels separate them and feed them one by one to the inkjet printer. The RF Lite’s hopper can also be easily adjusted to different sleeve sizes. This was an important feature for P.K.Foods Glasgow, whose pakoras are packed in different sized trays, depending on the customer. Chicken pakora, for example, are packed in 650g trays for Costco and 360g trays for Scotmid. Shelf life requirements also vary from


customer to customer, so product made on the same day might carry a slightly different expiry date depending on which retailer it is destined for. With a programmable function that calculates the correct expiry date for each product/customer, the RF Lite eliminates


the risk of date coding errors. Following a successful two-week trial


last November, the RF Lite with iJet TIJ printer became a permanent fixture at P.K.Foods Glasgow, coding on average 5000 sleeves per day. Stevenson reports that the coder has


already paid for itself through labour savings and sleeve waste reduction.He said: “We were employing at least two members of staff to hand stamp all day. Now one person just spends a couple of hours a day overprinting sleeves and the other staff have been redeployed on other picking and packing tasks.” One of the advantages of TIJ versus


other coding technologies such as CIJ is the lower cost of ownership. This is largely because the only ongoing cost is the purchase of new cartridges - it is an on demand service, maintenance- and consumable-free. P.K.Foods Glasgow finds the system very cost effective, getting 300,000 prints per cartridge. Aside from supermarkets, P.K.Foods


Glasgow uses other routes to market, with products for these customers all carrying labels rather than sleeves. On the basis of the success of the RF Lite, the company is now planning to move them to sleeves. Stevenson does not yet know whether


the current RF Lite alone will be able to cope with this increased throughput, but said: “If our existing RF Lite is finding it too much, I wouldn’t hesitate to purchase another.”


Rotech Machines www.rotechmachines.com


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