Dog food traveling along a conveyor on a production line

Pet Supplies

Coding & marking solutions for pet supplies

Owners are becoming increasingly invested in their pet’s health and wellbeing, and as a result, the demand for raw, natural pet food and specialised animal care products is growing.

With this shift in consumer requirements, manufacturers of such products need to be on top of their product coding to aid identification, traceability and to ensure safety. All packaging requires a date and batch code – veterinary products will also require more complex serialisation and GS1 codes.

Rotech’s coding solutions are both versatile and robust, meaning that they can adapt to various applications and production lines.

On-line industrial printers for pet product packaging

Mess and odour-free, high-resolution thermal inkjet (TIJ) printers apply quality codes directly onto cardboard, plastic, film and more. Due to the quality of print, TIJ is also well suited for serialization or applying 1D & 2D barcodes.

Our printers can be easily integrated into existing production lines to work seamlessly with other packaging machinery – they require little operator intervention due to the maintenance-free technology. As a result, uptime is dramatically increased.

Where there is a requirement to print a large amount of text, for example a declaration of ingredients, a thermal transfer (TTO) printer might be the most suitable option.

Off-line feeding of pet sleeves, cartons, and pouches

Feeding and handling systems are ideal for printing flat-form packaging away from the production line, most notably food sleeves, cartons, or pouches.

Off-line coding is most favourable when you require regular but small product runs with unique variable data printed on each batch. Businesses see a substantial shift in their overall efficiency and production when they move from a manual to an automatic coding process.

For cartons and sleeves, the RF Lite is a high-speed, cost-effective solution perfect for a growing business looking to step away from hand labelling. For pouches, Rotech has both the RF Pouch & RF Auto available.

Best before dated printed onto pet food sleeve using thermal inkjet printer
Outer case boxes printed with product information, barcodes and Julian code using large area printer

Applying code to secondary packaging

Our high-resolution large character marking (LCM) printers offer a low-maintenance, high-speed alternative to labelling on outer cases. The innovative systems are capable of printing verifiable barcodes, text, and graphics on areas up to 500mm wide.

For bespoke or raw pet food services, Outer cases and boxes can be used to ship individual, subscription orders with crucial branding printed directly to the box. The benefit of printing on demand is you can apply personalised print to suit the individual customer.

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Applications

 X72 Outer Case printer on a horticulture production line
  • You can have the best machine in the world but if staff don’t buy into it, you won’t get good results. All our operators found the RF Lite to be easy to use; they had no trouble switching between different sleeves and calling up the correct expiry dates for each customer.

    PK Foods

  • Our new sleeve feeder has saved us so much time, allowing us to carry out other tasks. We no longer have to hand-stamp each pack. The service we recieved has been excellent too. The engineer was very helpful and showed us how to set up the printer and we've even added our logo.

    Bonians

  • The print quality is awesome. It is clean and precise - you can read it even at a font size of 0.4. The bar codes are also very clear, which is important to the fishing shops we supply, as they don’t want to have to deal with illegible bar codes.

    Nash Tackle

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Resources

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Success stories

  • Best before dated printed onto pet food sleeve using thermal inkjet printer

    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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  • Statfold Seed Oil bottle label, best before date printed with Thermal Inkjet printer

    Nestled in the heart of rural Staffordshire, Statfold Barn Farm is the idyllic home to Statfold Seed Oil Ltd. Since 1992, the internationally successful family business has been producing high-quality organic and natural oils, cold pressed from the seeds from their...

    Engineer | Statfold Seed Oil

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  • Nash tackle pouches being fed on an RF Pouch

    Fishing bait producer Nash Tackle has seen a 50% increase in productivity after upgrading to Rotech’s new pouch coder for late stage customisation of packs.

    Nash Tackle

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  • Operator using the RF1 friction to feed and print cartons

    Dietary supplement manufacturer CellLife UK has the flexibility to place codes anywhere on pack and produce up to 4000 cartons per day, following its investment in an RF1-F coding system from Rotech.

    CellLife UK

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Pet food sleeve printed with batch number using best before date
Statfold Seed Oil Logo
Nash Baits logo
CellLifeUk Logo
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Related products

 Rotech team working together in the office at a computer
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Talk with an expert

Still unsure what you need? Our coding experts are on hand to help you find a solution that matches your exact requirements.