About Huntapac Produce

Huntapac Produce Ltd is a fourth generation family-owned business. Based in a small village in the heart of Lancashire, it specialises in growing, packing and distributing a variety of root vegetables, brassicas and salads. The company supplies several major UK supermarkets as well as wholesalers and processors.

The Need

One of the supermarkets Huntapac supplies required it to print a new font on all its products. Huntapac’s existing Thermal Transfer Overprinters were incapable of this, it needed to replace them at short notice.

More generally, the company required new Thermal Transfer Overprinters with greater printing capabilities and performance.

As Huntapac is a 24-hour, 364-days-a-year operation, it was vital that the installation would be swift and decisive, with minimal disruption to the production line.

The Solution

Clearmark identified its Zodiac Thermal Transfer Overprinter as the ideal solution – and quickly installed 17 of the state-of-the-art machines onto vertical former baggers at the factory.

These now code onto sealed plastic bags of vegetables, in various positions on the packaging depending on the requirements of each customer. The printers were installed in a quick, efficient, professional, and trouble-free manner – reflecting Cleamark's belief in supporting its customers and driving excellence through quality.

In just one week, Clearmark processed the sale and fully installed and integrated the system at the site. The turnover period of one week is unheard of in the coding industry, and Clearmark hugely impressed Huntapac with its quick and effective response.

Furthermore, several operators at Huntapac were also fully trained during the day, while Clearmark also introduced a hand-held scanning system to each production line and networked the entire coding operation.

The Benefit

The sophisticated ICE Zodiacs represent a huge improvement on Huntapac’s previous coding machines. Not only are they capable of meeting the company’s demand for printing its particular font in a certain size, but they have also greatly simplified its operation and significantly improved the overall print quality.

The coders are flexible enough to print dates in any format or size, and in any Windows TrueType font. Their class-leading ribbon capacity means less downtime for ribbon changeovers and can reduce waste, thus increasing production efficiency by up to 25%. In addition, the Zodiacs are versatile enough to be applied to a range of different packaging types.

The newly-installed network system can be maintained from a central database that allows Huntapac to control jobs from a single source, maximising uptime and code integrity, while the hand-held barcode scanner system is an extremely useful tool.

Furthermore, the operators who were trained during the installation day are now competent users of the machines. In addition, several unique ribbon save modes ensure efficient use of consumables, with typically less than 0.5mm of waste ribbon between prints, helping to keep cost of ownership as low as possible.

The Result

Huntapac is now able to code in the chosen font and size of its supermarket customer – and is also providing all its customers with a higher-quality coding solution that simultaneously saves it money and time.

“The machines have delivered excellent print quality throughout, reducing the need for line stoppage and pack wastage. The touchscreen display on each machine is also easy to use and information is presented in a clear and simple format.”– Stephen Shields, Technical Director at Huntapac