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Labelling Solutions


will make allergen labelling compulsory for all pre-packaged foods. Failure to adhere to regulations


surrounding the labelling of food and beverage product can have significant repercussions for manufacturers. In both the EU and the US, errors in product labelling related to allergens necessitate a mandatory recall of all mislabelled products – and despite the consequences, this continues to be an issue for manufacturers the world over. In November 2019, Stericycle’s US recall


index reported that undeclared allergens on food and beverage packaging were responsible for 35.5% of all mandated U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) food recalls for the third quarter of 2019. This represented the highest overall cause of recall for the ninth consecutive quarter. The issue is not unique to the US. In the first quarter of 2020, the Food Standards Agency in the UK issues 25 recalls due to undeclared allergies including milk, eggs, nuts, and celery from many big named brands. Equally, in Finland, data compiled by the Finnish Food Authority (Ruokavirasto) for 2019 found that undeclared allergens accounted for 27% of all product recalls. Of course, labelling issues are not just an issue in food and beverages: manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices are also subject to strict legislation surrounding the labelling of products on the market in order to keep consumers safe. Indeed, 9% of all medical device recall events in 2018 – to the tune of over a million units – were due to labelling issues.


LABELLING COMPLIANCE OBLIGATIONS Legislation and best practice recommendations surrounding the labelling of consumer products have become stricter in more recent years, placing increasing pressure on businesses not just to ensure that labels adhere to safety regulations, but also to put in place systems to identify and solve possible product labelling mistakes before they occur. Since January 2011, businesses in the US


have been required by law to implement preventative measures to avoid labelling mistakes in food and beverage manufacturing. The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), requires manufacturers to implement and monitor effective measures to prevent risks in production, including errors in product labelling. Globally, the International Food Standards and the Global Food Safety Initiative require that manufacturers and retailers implement procedures for label checking to ensure that products are labelled correctly and within the necessary scope of the laws in which they are sold. Meanwhile, in the UK, retailers wishing


to be a part of the British Retail Consortium must demonstrate that they have a system of checks in place to ensure check and ensure against product


36 October 2020


establishing good label management. With the simple application of IoT methodology, it is possible to integrate automated coding solutions to automatically populate labels information obtained from a production management system – this can further help to prevent mislabelled products arising from issues in label creation. Integrated label management solutions can be anything from a simple barcode scanner used to select data from a UPC or production order, to full integration with an existing MES or ERP system – enabling label creation directly from a centralised management system. Populated labels can then be


labelling errors. This includes having documented processes in place following product changeover, and changes in batches of packaging, to ensure that labels applied are correct for products packaged.


HOW DO YOU STOP THE ERRORS? Having identified that the primary cause of labelling errors lies in manual data entry, the first step towards reducing such errors clearly comes from simplifying or reducing the need for manual data entry on production lines. The answer lies in switching to an integrated system to ensure alignment of your product labelling with your current production order. At the most basic level, companies can utilise a label design software to automatically populate product labels and manage their distribution across multiple printers from a central location, such as a production office. This reduces the number of data entry points on the line itself, thereby reducing the chance of errors occurring. Furthermore, by replacing individual messages with a template tied to a product database, potentially one can reduce the number of labels being managed from hundreds to only a handful. Introducing label templates, and so


reducing the number of labels required to on production lines, not only makes it easier for manual workers involved in code selection, but it also makes it significantly easier to make changes to labels when legislation changes. To take a recent example, a Domino


customer involved in manufacturing pre- packaged food and beverages needed to make changes to their existing labels due to a change in barcode mandate. The company had over 1,500 labels and making the changes to every single label would have taken an entire week to complete. However, integrating their existing database, which already contained all the required label information, into label templates, allowed them to reduce their label count from 1500 down to just 5, reducing the time spent implementing updates to a fraction of the original. The next step in error reduction is in


automatically pushed through to a printer without any manual intervention, mitigating the risk of labelling errors and helping to grow efficiency on production lines.


VALIDATION AND VISION CONTROL The final step towards error-free coding is in establishing a validation system to ensure that all information on product labels is present, correct, and readable. Today, high-speed manufacturing


environments have made manual inspection of every product impossible and unreliable – an integrated vision control system (VCS) can instead be used to validate a product label, and further reduce the risk of the product reaching a retailer with improper information. Integrated cameras and a VCS can work alongside coding automation to verify information against production orders and shift codes, to eliminate labelling mistakes. They also can be used to provide verification for item-level serialisation – enabling track and trace of every pallet produced down to the case, or even the product itself. By checking label quality, a VCS can also


ensure that preventative actions are being taken during manufacturing: for example, it can be integrated with coding automation software to automatically stop production if a certain number of ‘no reads’ (products that fail to be read by the VCS) are reached within a certain period, or if the validated label data is inconsistent to the product the system believes is being produced. In this way, a VCS is an extremely


effective quality control tool, which provides an almost immediate return on investment by ensuring that labelling mistakes and quality issues are eliminated before they cause a problem.


CONCLUSION Product labelling is of primary importance to manufacturers and brands; yet, making significant changes to production processes is not always feasible. Integrated coding automation solutions can ensure the accuracy of product labelling, without necessitating significant changes to the production lines.


udomino-printing.com convertermag.com


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