Salad Makers was looking for an efficient and cost-effective method to automatically date stamp its pre-packaged punnets. They also wanted ready access to technical support if they needed it. Salad Makers chose Matthews Intelligent Identification.
Key facts:
- Easy to use
- Flexible applications
- Affordable
- Low maintenance
- Reliable technical support
Salad Makers, a division of Queensland-based Coastal Hydroponics, specialises in hydroponically grown lettuce, herbs, and mixed salad varieties. Salad Makers’ prepacked salad mixes are automatically flow wrapped but until recently were being dated by hand with a date gun.
Salad Makers’ MD Clint Moss says, “We clearly needed to make our production process much more efficient: we had someone standing there with a hand clicker to put the dates on, which was taking up far too much time and impacting our bottom line.”
As part of Salad Maker's quality assurance process, each punnet must be labelled with the supplier number code and a best before date. Salad Makers also wanted the capacity to add bar codes, should they be requested by customers.
Salad Makers chose a Linx TT5 from Matthews Intelligent Identification, for several reasons, including a recommendation from a major supermarket.
“Based on positive word-of-mouth feedback within the industry, we went straight to Matthews,” Clint says.
“We knew from others’ experience that the Linx TT5 was the best one to do the job for us. It does what we want it to do; we can actually change it around to print the way we want, and it can print bar codes if we need them.
“And Matthews has a strong reputation for customer service,” he adds, “which was really important to us.”
Salad Makers has already seen a big improvement in labour efficiency since the new thermal overprinter was installed, and is happy with its ease of operation.
“A terrific benefit,” Clint says, “is that the colour touch-screen is not only easy to use, it allows users to preview messages before coding begins, which helps us to spot coding errors well before we print.”
Clint says the simple ribbon cassettes are quick to change, and because the cassettes contain a long standard ribbon, 1,000m. So fewer ribbon changes are required anyway, which, in turn, reduces the cost of replacing consumables.
Salad Makers can also easily switch between intermittent and continuous printing modes.
“Having these options, as well as left or right-hand operation, means that installing our new Linx TT5 thermal overprinter has been a long-term investment for the future, as well as meeting our immediate needs. It will be adaptable whenever our production requirements change.”