March’s machine of the month is an innovative standalone ‘Stack Feed‘ system for labelling flat corrugated cardboard boxes built for The Authentic Food Company, a leading manufacturer of high quality frozen ready meals and snacks. The machine was designed to apply large multi lingual labels for foreign markets across the corner of the box which were of a size that could not practically be applied by hand. This solution allows The Authentic Food Company to label blank boxes rather than purchasing more costly pre-printed ones, providing greater flexibility over the label content as well as cost savings on the boxes.
The machine itself is extremely versatile; it can be fully adjusted to suit a wide range of case sizes and easily reconfigured in under two minutes. Authentic Foods currently apply a pre-printed label stock using ALTech’s well proven ALritma labelling head. This sophisticated unit includes many advanced functions; most notably the possibility of applying two labels per box (e.g. front and side) in the same pass where required.
Due to the modular design of ALTech machines, Authentic Foods also have the possibility to add a print engine in the future enabling them to print and apply on demand labels, potentially removing a separate print room process. ALTech’s unique solution is also available with the option to apply labels to the bottom of the box in the same pass, providing a four sided corner-wrap opposite corner labelling solution often required by supermarkets or the possibility of separate labels on all panels of the box.
ALTech’s innovative machine is not only low cost but also has huge efficiency savings, meaning that the cost of the machine can be recovered in less than one year for most companies. It can be continuously reloaded without stopping (holds approx 200 boxes), providing substantial labour savings over hand labelling, as well as a highly accurate and consistent label application.
This is an ideal solution for customers who have a number of lines producing a wide variety of products, likely to require a range of box and/or label formats which are not easily compatible with an online case labelling solution. Not only does it offer the benefit of labelling blank boxes, rather than more expensive pre-printed ones, the buyer will be more satisfied with their consistently labelled products, minimising expensive re-works and maximising staff productivity, therefore, resulting in substantial cost savings.
