Waterfield's bakery, of Leigh in Manchester, has chosen a Thermocode 53CR continuous thermal transfer printer from Open Date Equipment to apply 'best before' dates to its range of confectionery products.
The company, which has 47 retail outlets in North West England as well as a thriving wholesale business, found that its current inkjet was unsuitable for the task due to the irregular nature of its coding requirements.
Fitted to an Ilapak Panda flowrapper the Thermocode printer is used to add 'best before' dates to products such as flapjacks and Bakewell tarts. The machine gives Waterfield's the flexibility to edit formats on a daily basis via the printer display module, plus simple and mess free changeover of consumables, says Open Date.
"Sometimes we are running for only three days a week, packing our confectionery ranges," explained systems manager Wendy Parr. "The thermal printer can be switched on randomly and will start up again without any major resetting or maintenance necessary."
"We originally purchased the thermal printer for our wholesale business, but we have found it is useful for some of our retail products too. Its flexibility and the ability to switch it on and off 'on demand' make it ideal for our type of business," added Ms Parr.
Thermocode Series 2 continuous on-line thermal printers are specially designed for products which are fed continuously by a parent machine such as a flowrapper. They are available in two print widths, 53mm and 107mm and can print images up to 500mm long. Both left and right handed versions are available.
These printers can be operated locally via the operator interface, directly from a PC via a serial or USB port or they can be added to an existing TCP/IP (Ethernet) network. TCP/IP and USB ports are optional extras.
An intermittent range is also available offering 6 models with print areas from 53 x 53mm up to 107 x 160mm.