Home // Success Stories // Branston Potatoes Success Story: From a team of 12 hand labelling to an RF Lite® coding 15,600 sleeves in 2 hours

Branston Potatoes Success Story: From a team of 12 hand labelling to an RF Lite® coding 15,600 sleeves in 2 hours

3 minutes

Branston Potatoes, a major supplier of fresh and prepared potato products to the UK’s leading retailers and food manufacturers, recently undertook a major transformation to streamline its production processes. By adopting an RF Lite all-in-one batch coding system, they reduced costs, labour requirements and significantly increased productivity on their production line.

About Branston Potatoes

Branston is a key player in the UK’s potato industry, processing, preparing, and packaging over 350,000 tonnes of potatoes annually.

Their dedication to innovation is evident in their new mash factory, which is the largest and most modern facility of its kind in the UK. This cutting-edge facility is built to meet growing demand, producing millions of packs of mashed potatoes. From carrot to swede to sweet potato mash – all tastes have been catered for!

Watch the RF Lite in action at Branston

Problem

Branston needed to address inefficiencies that had developed in their existing processes. One challenge was manual labelling, which had become a bottleneck on their production line.

Previously, a team of 10-12 people were required to hand label up to 20,000 packaging sleeves per day. This process was extremely labour-intensive, costly, and ultimately unnecessary for a company striving for modern, scalable solutions. As production increased, the limitations of this method of coding became more evident, making it harder for the team to keep pace with the company’s growing needs.

Solution

Branston turned to the RF Lite — a compact, high-speed coding system. Ideal for applying batch and date codes directly onto flat form packaging such as sleeves, cartons and pouches.

With the system in place, only two operators were required to manage the sleeve coding process. This not only freed up 10 team members to focus on other valuable tasks, but also improved the accuracy of the print placement.

The compact system fitted neatly into the existing workflow, optimising efficiency – no need for a major overhaul of the production environment.

Results

With the RF Lite, Branston have cut down on manual labour, reduced waste and now experience huge cost savings.

In total, their date coding is now 19x more time efficient. Before, they were paying for 96 labour hours (12 people x 8 hour days) to code 20,000 sleeves. Now they are using 4 labour hours (2 people x 2 hours) to code 15,600 sleeves. A shift that has allowed the company to easily meet the demands of their growing production line.

How can we help other production lines?

Branston is proof that even large manufacturers with extensive production lines and big facilities can benefit from off-line feeding systems. Just because there’s the capability to run packaging on-line doesn’t always make it the most efficient method for batch and date coding.

All-in-one coding systems offer more flexibility than coding directly on the line and are faster, less labour-intensive, and more cost-effective than labelling by hand.

Whether you’re an SME or a large enterprise, you could benefit from an on-site demonstration of the RF Lite.

Try out your packaging on the RF Lite

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