Food sleeve printed using thermal inkjet with best before date

Sleeves

Flexible and reliable food sleeve coding solutions from Rotech

Wraparound sleeves are a very popular choice for food products; particularly ready meals packaged in trays, tubs, or pots. Our systems and printers are designed to easily handle and print/label sleeves of all different shapes and sizes.

Thermal inkjet for coding sleeves

Thermal inkjet (TIJ) is ideally suited for printing best before dates and batch numbers onto both varnished and unvarnished cardboard commonly used for food sleeves. A TIJ printer is the most cost-effective solution for sleeve printing as it tends to only require a small amount of information such as a ‘use by’ or ‘best before’ date. The print is high-resolution and permanent, a crucial element for food companies with customer safety and brand reputation in mind.

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Coding sleeves off-line

Sleeves can prove difficult to print on-line as they can present the following problems:

Certain print areas may be hard to access
Tall tubs or pots can be unstable and difficult to guide down a packaging line
When placed around trays, sleeves can move making accurate code placement difficult

Taking the coding process off-line using an off-line coding system can solve these issues. The innovative feeder systems take a stack of sleeves in their fat form and consistently present them to the printer and/or labeller, allowing for reliable and accurate code positioning – increasing line efficiency and reducing waste from poorly printed packs.

Off-line systems are very useful for promotional or trial run products as they can produce high-quality codes quickly without impacting on other production. They are also a great cost-effective solution to keep up with seasonal spikes in production.

Off-line sleeve feeding systems

RF Lite sleeve coder

The RF Lite offers the ideal solution for companies looking to automate their date coding process. Fitted with reliable thermal inkjet technology, the RF Lite is ideal for the concise date or batch coding of sleeves.

RF Auto

A step up from the RF Lite, the RF Auto fitted with either Thermal Inkjet (TIJ) or Continuous Inkjet (CIJ) is ideal for printing date and batch codes onto sleeves at exceptionally high speeds for lengthy periods of time.

The RF Auto can also accommodate a labeller when there is a requirement to apply a label onto the sleeve.

Success stories

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...

Branston Potatoes
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A manufacturer of nutrition-rich, hand-cooked meals for dogs has automated its date coding process with the help of a cost-effective sleeve coding system from Rotech, allowing them to keep up with demand while ensuring their date codes remain legible, even in chang...

Producer of nutritional, hand-made dog food
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Rotech’s RF Lite has become an “invaluable part of the process” at P.K.Foods Glasgow Ltd, having transformed the efficiency of the pakora producer’s coding operation. The user-friendly TIJ (thermal inkjet) coder has won over staff on the factory floor and e...

PK Foods
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A RF2 feeding system fitted with thermal inkjet printer from Rotech has allowed The English Cheesecake Company to date code a pallet’s worth of cheesecakes in less than 2 minutes.

The English Cheesecake Company
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