Meat processor quadruples throughput with labelling technology

Since its inception in the mid-1860s, Australian company Greenham & Sons has grown from a sole trader family business to a multimillion-dollar meat processing business.

When company growth meant that the company’s processing speed far outweighed its ability to label products, in 2015 Greenham approached Result Group for advice on upgrading its labelling system.

Result Group recommended the HERMA multipurpose Meat Tray Label and Sleeve Applicator.

“The move from hand to automatic label application has effectively quadrupled our throughput of beef products. Previously our production limitation was the label application step, but now because of the automatic HERMA label applicator we are more than keeping up with the speed of product processing,” Greenham Production Manager Michael White said.

A key benefit to Greenham of the HERMA Applicator is its versatility; a number of different product sizes and meat shapes can be put through the single labelling machine.

The equipment also weighs every item so the labels not only include the exact weight of each individual pack, they can include the retail price based on the preset price per kilo. For Greenham, this results in products that are shelf-ready before they’ve even left the plant. Details are automatically extracted from Greenham’s ERP system to streamline data transfers for the production team.

The electronic weight functionality also results in the automatic rejection of packs that don’t meet specifications. If a pack is under- or overweight it is not put through. This removes the need for the meat to be weighed by hand while processing and therefore creates efficiencies, speeding up the entire processing stage.

The HERMA multipurpose Meat Tray Label and Sleeve Applicator prints both barcodes and QR codes on the labels for Greenham. And it is also able to top and bottom label products in one pass with accuracy — suitable for traceability and multilingual labelling for export markets.