Labelling equipment upgrade at Goodman Fielder

Goodman Fielder’s plant at Mascot in New South Wales has made a gain from a modest investment, by upgrading its labelling equipment on the bottle labelling line. The outlay has delivered an annual saving with a payback in around six months, achieved with the additional equipment.

“It was a matter of upgrading our labelling line for plastic bottles for the various bottled foodstuffs we produce at the site,” said Mark Cockburn, the company’s plant engineer at the Mascot site.

“We were labelling a range of our different size retail packs with a Tronics Series 3 labelling machine - we have used Tronics equipment for about four years.

“It had always been in the back of our mind that the time required for changing over label rolls represented lost output time. Although it was an efficient process to change the empty label roll for a new one in only five minutes, it still represented a significant amount of time over a year,” explained Mark.

“The time and motion study told us that we were losing, on average, 5.9 hours a month for the changeover of label rolls.”

The upgrade has proved itself for Goodman Fielder - downtime has been reported as dropping dramatically to an almost negligible number.