Heat transfer writing is not fear cooking

Diversified Food & Seasonings Inc. has expanded its pouch printing capabilities to expand the market for flavored foods, in order to expand the market for Cajun's (Editor's Note: "Cajun" refers to the French descendants who moved to Louisiana in the southern United States). Diversification requirements.

Diversified Food & Seasonings currently operates four production facilities in the United States, producing more than 2 million pounds per week. The products include frozen cajun foods, Cajun culinary spices, condiments and blending powders. With the changes in labeling technology and the expansion of overseas markets, the company needed a more flexible system that required the system to be able to print more information on the film.

Today, the company is using six 5-inch intermittent motion online EasyPrint i heat transfer machines manufactured by Bell-Mark. The company uses these printers in four manufacturing plants and prints product ingredients, lot numbers, lot numbers, and expiration dates in English or other languages.

Diversified Food & Seasonings is a business unit with full ownership of ACI Investment Group. Its specialty is to provide recipes for various food service organizations. The company's main products include a variety of soy, soy sauce and gravy, dry seasonings, biscuit mixes, and flours, all of which are individually formulated to meet the customer's unique taste.

The company's four factories have division of labor in product categories. For example, in one of the areas, the main use is a flour baler manufactured by General Packaging Equipment, which weighs 5 pounds. In the small-batch cooking workshops here, vertical airtight shrink-wrapped filling and sealing equipment is used to package flavor stews, lobsters, barbecues, picnic black soybeans and assorted dishes, weighing from 2 to 5 pounds. The other plant is primarily responsible for handling and packaging the company's five-pound bags, which include steamed bags of red beans, gravy and soy sauce. The equipment used was two new Cryovac onpack Model 2070 vertical pouch packers.

According to John Remesnik, the company’s director of maintenance and engineering, the emergence of the new labeling method has forced the company to change its packaging printing system. He said: "We can't put product labels on bags. This is a requirement of the new rules for allergens. The product labeling requirements are strict, and the amount of printed content on packaging also increases."

Remesnik said that one of the reasons the company chose the EasyPrint system is that the system can print inks with a high resolution (300 dpi). The printed content will not be damaged when used on a cooking bag, because the high resin ink ribbon will not permanently print the content. Discoloration. ”

Another selling point of EasyPrint is that it has a large print area, which can print bar codes, logos and real-time information. The print area of ​​the 5-inch EasyPrint i printer is 534 inches, which in addition to giving a valid period, can also add some personalized ingredient catalogs and batch numbers to different series of products, so that once the product has a problem, you can And process conditions are tracked.

Remesnik said: "If impurities are found in our products, serial numbers can help us to locate the batch of products so that we can quickly find the source."


For diverse food and condiment companies, the flexibility of the EasyPrint printer is also important. In the company's four production plants, the system must print both polyethylene film and polypropylene/PE film, and the bags are of different sizes. In one of the factories, it is also required to print units of measurement in multiple languages ​​because the plant's products are sold to South Korea, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and other countries.

The system is also flexible in creating and modifying tagged content. The QA department can use Bell Mark's VersaStyle thermal transfer design software to design new tags. After the design is complete, the label content is stored on the OmniDrive card and can be used when packaging the product. To change the content of the tag is also very simple, just select the tag from the card, and then change the tag content through the keyboard with the card reader. Programming the printer is also very simple. The operator simply selects the pre-programmed label file from the card.

Remesnik said: "Our biggest advantage is that we can quickly and easily modify the contents of the label. We can turn the North Korean alphabet into Arabic letters or even numerical labels in one day, which is indeed worth the money."

The printer is mounted on a stand above the vertical pouch packer. From the position where the printer is installed, the film passes from the feed roller to the forming ring. The main maintenance work is just wipe the print head and keep it clean.

Remesnik said that the largest repair cost comes from the cooking bag system. He said: “Because the cooking bag system requires high temperatures and cleanliness, each machine will use about 3 printheads per year.” Although the cost is more than the company expected, the cost is still flat compared with the previous printing method.

With the EasyPrint printer, the vertical form/fill/seal machine can be operated at the highest rated speed of 36 pouches/minute, maximizing production capacity.