Continuous Inkjet Printing - Carton Printing

Food, glorious food - the benefits of using Continuous Ink Jet

2020 will go down in history as a challenging time for food producers. While it is vital that food supplies to supermarkets are uninterrupted and rigorous hygiene is maintained, we should not forget the importance of the printed information that is provided to the consumer when it is on the shelf. There are heavy fines for batch and date codes that do not meet required legislation, and the printed codes must meet stringent traceability requirements should any recall be needed.

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You need to think about your ink

We’ve all been there. Starving at the end of the day and rushing into a supermarket to pick up something to eat. Consumers may give a cursory glance at the best before date on the package to confirm that the item is safe to eat. They give no thought (and why should they) to how much research and development has gone into the ink displaying the information on the package. Not so for those responsible for coding and marking in the food industry.

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How to Manage Production Remotely During a Disaster

The CDC reports a total of 6.8 million cases of Covid-19 with over 200,000 deaths in the US. We know it’s much safer to have employees work from home when possible to minimize risk of exposure since working onsite is extremely risky during Covid-19 even with social distancing measures. Essential businesses such as food and beverage and pharmaceuticals have no choice but to maintain operations to continue to ship products on time. It is possible to keep product identification equipment going in essential industries while most or all your employees are working remotely.

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How do I get labels to stick in hot and humid environments?

Something to be aware of when considering using labeling for product identification in a hot or humid environment is that labels are sensitive to temperature, making facility environment temperature a determining factor in choosing what label material to use on a product.

Tagged With: compliance, label applicator, labeling, packaging

How to Overcome Manufacturing Challenges During a Crisis

During the COVID-19 pandemic, manufacturers in essential industries such as food, hygiene products, and medical supplies are needed more than ever. It’s critical that these products continue to be produced and shipped in a timely manner, to support the growing demand. Current manufacturers are doing the best they can to keep their production up at this time. And moreover, companies in industries from cosmetics to breweries to sustainable clothing are pivoting in the face of the COVID-19 disaster.

How can IIoT and centralized printer management software improve your operation?

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is transforming manufacturing and a whole host of other industries. IIoT connects industrial devices that can monitor, collect, exchange, and analyze data, and leverage that data and connectivity to help you make smarter, faster and more effective business decisions.

Tagged With: connectivity, IIoT, material handling

Why Automated Material Handling and Data Management Are Vital to Achieving Packaging Compliance

To achieve packaging compliance, manufacturers need more than picking the right product coding technology. Data management and packaging control and automation add another level of sophistication to an operation’s compliance practices.

How to Pick the Best Product Identification Solution

Step one of a manufacturer’s game plan for packaging compliance is to understand your manufacturing code and print application requirements, in order to pick the product identification solution that is best for your needs.

4 Key Considerations To Achieve Packaging Compliance

The importance of packaging compliance in the supply chain cannot be overlooked. Consumer packaged goods need to meet packaging compliance to adhere to global and government regulations and retailer standards for product safety. When manufacturers fail packaging compliance, they can be subject to significant penalties and fines, suffer loss of customers and reputation, suffer supply chain inefficiencies, and more.

Score Savings with Diagraph at PACK EXPO Las Vegas in Booth C-4000

Every year the biggest show in packaging and processing raises the bar for innovation and consumer trends. Whether you're looking for a solution to production challenges or you're attending to absorb new industry information, experts from across the industry exhibit at PACK EXPO to share their latest and greatest products and services. This fall, PACK EXPO kicks off in Las Vegas on September 23rd through the 25th.

Demand for Flexible Packaging Expected to Grow

The US food industry is the leader for flexible packaging with the market continuing to grow with an expected 3.9% CAGR and valuation of $392 billion by 2023. Flexible packaging currently accounts for 19% of the packaging market – second only to corrugated paper. Advancements in slider closures, fitments, and improved barrier properties are driving preferences amongst both manufacturers and consumers.

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Your Guide To Automating Your Pallet Labeling Process

The final step in your production process can often be overlooked. After rigorously completing all the upstream processing, packaging and coding processes, the final palletized product seems to be a small step before crossing the finish line. Labeling at the pallet level is, however, a crucial process for identifying palletized shrink-wrapped products being shipped to retailers.

Buying Versus Leasing Product Identification Equipment

Capital expenses can be tough to get approved and can hold up much needed upgrades at the plant level. In fact – old, faulty, and inadequate equipment can cause costly disruptions to production, impacting the bottom line more significantly than the cost to upgrade. For manufacturers without the available capital to invest in purchasing new equipment, leasing can be a great option.

Diagraph Equipment Maintenance Agreements

Our goal at Diagraph is to make maintaining your coding and labeling equipment both proactive and predictable. “Proactive” because we believe that service interventions should always be planned, never a surprise. “Predictable” because we believe that service interventions should be done around your production schedule. When done properly, this helps eliminate equipment downtime, keeping your production running as smoothly as possible.

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Diagraph Coding and Labeling Equipment Training Programs

At Diagraph Marking & Coding, we believe that service interventions should always be planned, never a surprise. There are several components to an operations and maintenance program that make this possible, but one of the most important ones that we like to focus on is operator and maintenance team training.

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How Account Trends Impact Future Planning for Coding and Labeling Operations

At Diagraph Marking & Coding, we like to work closely with customers to understand the cycles of their business. This allows us to develop and recommend a personalized plan to manage maintenance schedules and on-hand supplies for their coding and labeling operations.

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Creating a Preventive Maintenance Plan Based on Equipment Utilization

At Diagraph Marking & Coding, we believe that service interventions should always be planned, never a surprise. This is why we like to work with customers to get out ahead of wear-caused failures, giving them the ability to decide when service will be done around their own production schedules.

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Creating a Supply Strategy Based on Production Run Rates

Diagraph Marking & Coding focuses on partnering with customers in every aspect of their coding and labeling operations, including working closely to develop a unique supply strategy that ensures our customers have the appropriate coding and labeling supplies on hand for when they need them.

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Top Considerations When Selecting Coding Equipment In The Dairy Industry

Products containing animal milk are on a constant time clock. Cows must be milked every day, meaning it is possible for dairy operations to be running 24/7 to get products with under a 20-day expiration period out the door and onto shelves. In these fast-paced manufacturing environments for fluid milk, cheese, yogurt, butter and ice cream products, there are several reasons that impact the method and features required for achieving legible marks and labels onto packaging.

Simplifying Ease of Use with One Touch Product Coding Solutions

“Easy to use” is a designation that many quality equipment manufacturers strive for. When comparing products side by side for their ease of use, nothing is simpler than distilling a process down to a single step. At Diagraph, we like to focus on delivering “one touch solutions”. When evaluating product coding solutions, look for the following:

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Inkjet Printhead Durability Drives Ease of Use

Not all inkjet printheads are created equal. Some printheads are designed to offer superior uptime performance, making them easier to operate and use when coding product. Look for the following features when choosing an inkjet coder, whether it is a small character inkjet coder for printing on primary product packaging or a high resolution large character inkjet coder for printing on cases:

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Top Recommended Inks for Inkjet Coding in the Dairy Industry

No one wants to risk their health or the health of their family by bringing home dairy products with indistinguishable expiration dates. Regardless if your dairy plant produces fluid milk, cheese, yogurt or ice cream, if your product does not have a legible expiration date on it chances are your product will remain on grocer’s shelves.

How to Reduce Marking Mistakes and Ensure Proper Code Adhesion

What does your company do when products are marked with the wrong product identification codes? Scrap? Rework? Mismarked and mislabeled products can create big hits to the bottom line. When encountering marking mistakes with regularity, companies can find it difficult to keep profit margins under control. What’s worse is if mismarked or mislabeled products make it out to market, manufacturers can face penalties from retailers and the risk of product recalls.

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Is a Product Identification Site Audit Right for Your Facility?

If you haven’t had a top-to-bottom review of your coding and labeling operations within the past 5 to 10 years, you are probably overdue for a comprehensive product identification site audit. Technological advancements have allowed for manufacturers to achieve greater efficiencies and accuracy with their product coding efforts for all levels of packaging

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Marking 125 Years in Business with Special Customer Savings at PACK EXPO International

2018 marks Diagraph’s 125th anniversary in business and we’re inviting the industry to celebrate this momentous occasion with us at PACK EXPO International in Chicago. Diagraph is exhibiting at booth N-5721 with our full line-up of product solutions including small character inkjet, high-resolution inkjet case coders, all-electric labelers and thermal transfer overprinters. Come visit us and discover our new initiatives designed to make product identification easy for our customers

Why Diagraph Believes in Predictable Service Support

Our customers that realize the most value over the life of their coding and labeling equipment utilize some level of support from our factory-trained field service engineers. We fundamentally believe that service interventions should always be planned, never a surprise. With our flexible service and support options, we put customers in the driver’s seat of deciding when service will be done around their own production schedules.

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Diagraph's Commitment To On-Time Delivery

Not having what you need for your coding and labeling equipment when you need it can put a halt to production. This is why we recommend taking a proactive approach to the supplies you need to keep your equipment up and running in tip-top condition. The result? Your coding and labeling operations run like a well-oiled machine, with the right amount of consumables at the ready based on your production and the right parts on hand leading up to preventive maintenance actions.

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What is the Diagraph Uptime Advantage?

As a key component in our Diagraph Solution Center model, the Diagraph Uptime Advantage focuses on delivering more uptime through our products with minimal intervention requirements. We believe that our coding and labeling solutions should be the least of your worries. This is why our equipment solutions are built to withstand the toughest of manufacturing environments and consistently produce high quality marks – print after print after print.

Inside Diagraph’s Solution Matching Services

To help our customers combat this growing issue, we are introducing what we call Diagraph Solution Matching Services. We will partner with you to conduct a complete site audit at your facility or, for larger customers, your family of facilities to pinpoint opportunities where slight changes in coding operations can provide valuable benefits.

Introducing the Diagraph Solution Center

In the process of celebrating our past, we couldn’t help but look to the future. How are we going to write the next chapter in our 125-year-old story? This is a question that we asked ourselves leading up to this important anniversary. One thing we know for sure is that this chapter is not being written without the direct involvement of our customers as we have turned to them to help us chart a new course.

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Delivering Innovation at Diagraph for 125 Years – and Counting

Let’s set the scene: The year is 1893. Pepsi is introduced to the world for the first time as “Brad’s Drink” in New Bern, North Carolina. The zipper – referred to as a “clasp locker” – makes its debut at the Chicago World’s Fair. Inspired by views from Pikes Peak in Colorado, Katharine Lee Bates writes “America the Beautiful”. And on the banks of the Mississippi River along the St. Louis Levee, cargo piles up as it’s awaiting hand addressing…

Keep Up With Snack Packaging Trends With Smarter CIJ Technology

No longer is it the case that snacks are packaged specifically for children’s lunch boxes. Today, the snack market is heavily geared towards adults with 94% of adults snacking at least once a day and 50% snacking 2 to 3 times a day.* Snack producers are tasked with changing traditional packaging to address a different kind of consumer.

Are You Ready to Automate Date Coding on Your Ready-to-Eat Products?

Fast-paced lifestyles of the working class and a growing number of Millennials demanding on-the-go options are two contributing factors to the rise in the ready-to-eat (RTE) prepared foods market with a projected CAGR of 7.2% between 2016-2026 With the versatility of the packaging substrates and forms for RTE products, we are outlining some key considerations to keep in mind for date coding to still achieve demanding throughput goals.

How to create durable ISPM 15 compliance marks on wooden pallets

Shipping products using wood packaging and dunnage between countries is a process regulated by the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC). Wooden materials like pallets and crates can potentially carry diseases or insects from one country into another where an infestation would negatively impact the ecosystem. Composed of 175 member countries, the IPPC has established requirements around the treatment of wood packaging leaving and entering their countries to prevent infestations that could be harmful to their local plant life.

Color Contrasting Inkjet Coder Runs Cleaner for Longer

Diagraph is pleased to announce the launch of the Linx 8900 Plus Series – an advanced range of color contrasting inkjet technology that provides the highest levels of printer reliability and ease of use. Enhancements in printhead design and pigment particle dispersion in the Linx 8900 Series prevent common clogging issues associated with inkjet systems when using color soft pigment-based inks.

Benefits of automated coding in the meat, poultry and seafood packing industries

According to a recent PMMI Business Intelligence Report, the meat, seafood, and poultry packing industries are experiencing “a global boom” due to several factors including import and export opportunities expanding into new markets, growth in foodservice, and growth in ready meals. Food producers are rapidly moving to automate processing and packaging to be prepared to meet increased demand and be flexible enough to adapt to changing product coding requirements.

Understanding High Resolution Inks for Your Industrial Inkjet Printer

Selecting ink for your inkjet technology – impulse jet, valve jet or thermal jet – requires an understanding of your application and some basic qualities of the inks available. We asked our inkjet experts for key information to help shine some light on understanding the ink options available in the market.

The Top Choice for Date, Lot and Batch Coding

Diagraph’s customers have spoken and they prefer the Linx 8900 continuous inkjet printer for their date, lot and batch doing needs! Customer feedback cited several reasons that the Linx 8900 model is their top choice.

Using Product Coding and Labeling to Manage a Growing Number of SKUs

A number of factors contribute to the drastic rise in SKUs, like company acquisitions and portfolio merging, flavor variety, count variety and retailer-specific case sizes, to name a few. Managing an increasing number of SKUs is costly for snack food manufacturers, especially when a bulk of them only contribute a small portion to their bottom-line profit.

What is Retail-Ready Packaging?

Increasing in popularity among big box chains is retail-ready packaging (RRP). A retail-ready package refers to secondary packaging that is branded appropriately to be able to move to retail shelves in a quick, “one touch” movement.

No Time to Train Production Line Workers in New Technology? No Problem.

Companies rely on engineers or technicians to keep production lines up and running. These job functions are essential to hitting production targets, so it is key that their skill level on equipment is proficient. When making the decision to replace this equipment, the amount of time and money that will have to be invested in training your labor is a major deciding factor.

What Makes a Good Spare Industrial Inkjet Printer?

Downtime in your production simply isn’t an option. But at any moment, an unpredictable event can arise like low ink levels, maintenance and clogging, putting your operations on hold anywhere from an hour to an entire shift. So how do you prepare for the unexpected? One option that we see put into practice by many customers is the investment in a spare inkjet printer – a reliable, on-hand system that can quickly be fired up on a production line when your regular systems suddenly quit.

Enhance the Food Safety Process with Functional Inks

Continuous inkjet (CIJ) is the technology of choice for food packaging coding as the solvent based inks adhere to a variety of materials like cartons, plastics, films, foils, metal and glass. CIJ is ideal for food packaging in that it offers high speed, non-contact small character printing and enables food processors to incorporate inkjet codes into their functional safety and traceability processes.

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Diagraphs Blog covers the latest in coding and labeling products