Labelling premium smallgoods

Barkly Continental is a supplier of top grade, hand made specialty European-style hams, sausages, and other pickled and smoked pork products.

The constant tightening of food hygiene, packaging, information and labelling laws means traditional companies like Barkly have to look for every handling efficiency they can.

In the past, all Barkly products carried two labels, a product and company branding label and a separate consumer information sticker, totalling an annual 200,000 manually applied labels. The insignia automated system now connects a weigh-scale, a laptop computer and a printer to produce a pre-coded, individually weight-accurate label for every single item off the production line.

The labels supply all the information required by law, and more: weight, contents, nutritional data, use-by date, preservative information, packaging and use-by dates and storage recommendations. The insignia solution reduces label quantities by half, decreases labour and increases production speed.

Boyd Rose from insignia says: Barkly traditionally used a weigh-scale label printer. It limited them to the number of products they could input into the scale's memory. Any new product information changes would need a programmer to come in at their cost.

Also, scale-printers have limited fonts, sizes and layouts so the label was very bland. Barkly was applying two labels branding label which was attractive to the customer and a secondary nutritional label that complied to the industry's labelling laws. Changes to labelling requirements happens a lot in the small goods sector and mean even more cost to the customer.

Rose adds the aim of the insignia solution was to eliminate traditional restrictions, improve productivity and reduce costs. The new system uses an industrial label printer, labelling software and an industrial weigh-scale.