According to Mintel, the chilled desserts segment was the only part of the desserts category to grow in both value and volume terms over the five-year period from 2008 to 2013, reflecting the continued migration towards chilled from ambient and frozen desserts. Within the chilled desserts segment, single-serve, premium offerings are leading the charge.
Many of these high-end desserts come in sophisticated pack formats such as stemmed sundae pots and ramekins.
Whilst these shapely new designs add shelf appeal, they can cause headaches for the sleeve coding operation.
Premium desserts are often made and packaged by hand. To code the packs with use by dates, factories have the choice of hand stamping or running the packs past a coder mounted on a dedicated conveyor belt. The issue with coding online in an otherwise manual operation is that you are adding automation just to apply the code, and applying the code in the right place can be tricky.
It is straightforward enough to apply best before dates and traceability codes to a four-pack of yogurts or a sleeve wrapped twin-pack of pots that is being transported past the coder via a conveyor with a good guide rail. However, with more awkwardly shaped packs, the chances of the feeding system presenting the pack and sleeve squarely to the coder can be slim. Conical sundae-style containers, for example, are inherently unstable and can easily topple over on a conveyor belt.
Getting the coder into the correct position can also be difficult, as shaped packs tend to have difficult-to-reach areas. And you can guarantee that the most difficult-to-reach part of the pack will be where the marketing department will stipulate the code should be, so as to make the code more discreet.
If the coder misses the target area, this results in mis-coded packs, which can potentially cost dessert manufacturers thousands in retailer fines. Even if mis-codes are spotted before a product leaves the line, there is still a cost to the manufacturer in reworking the product. Recurrent mis-codes can lead to major production inefficiencies.
Thankfully, there is a third way: offline coding. Many companies are seeing the benefits of such systems. When a multi-site food company won a contract to produce a new range of desserts for one of the multiple grocery retailers the packaging consisting of a tall conical sundae container with a watch strap sleeve, it was presented to the production department as a fait accompli. As the dessert was packed by hand, online coding didn’t make sense and would in any case have been difficult due to the design of the pack.
Rotech recommended its RF2 – a standalone friction feed overprinting system that would enable the manufacturer to code sleeves offline and bring them to the production line already printed. Engineered specifically for the food industry, the RF2 uses Rotech’s stack-to-stack feeding technology to pick sleeves from a stack, accurately print date or batch codes, and place the printed sleeve neatly onto another stack for collection, all at speeds of 400 per minute.
Off-line coders also come into their own when immediate additional capacity or super-fast coding is needed. This scenario arose at fast growing artisan dessert producer Pots & Co.
This boutique company produces a retail range of high end desserts from recipes developed by Michelin-trained chefs. The desserts, which are packed in individual ceramic ramekins with plastic lids and an outer cardboard sleeve, include lemon & lime posset, chocolate & orange pot and sticky toffee pudding.
The company has grown rapidly. In 2012 Pots & Co was making about 1,500 desserts a week. By the end of 2013, they were producing more than 10,000 pots per week by hand. These are sold in top tier retailers such as Waitrose, Booths and Selfridges.
As the company has grown its coding requirements have changed. In the early days, hand stamping several hundred sleeves a day with use by dates was perfectly manageable. However, when several hundred became several thousand, Pots & Co called on Rotech.
Rotech supplied its RF2 offline sleeve coding system as means of pre-coding the sleeves for an entire day’s production in less than an hour.
Fraser Thomson, operations director at Pots & Co commented, “Over the past couple of years we have rapidly expanded and using the Rotech RF2 coding system has allowed us to keep up to speed with production levels to meet our customer demands. The RF2 prints date and batch codes with ease in the correct position each and every time. We are delighted with the system and no longer have the worry of poorly printed eligible codes which can be resultant of hand stamping.”
