Flexible Offline Printing System for Overprinting Pouches

When Nash Tackle suddenly found itself under pressure to include nutrient and ingredient declarations on all of its fishing baits, product feeding and coding specialist Rotech came to the rescue with a flexible offline system capable of overprinting pouches with shoals of different data.

Essex-based Nash Tackle just about has the angling supplies market sewn up, keeping fishing tackle shops stocked with everything from bivvies and shelters to rods and reels. Baits are a major chunk of its business, with a portfolio that takes in hundreds of different boilies, pastes, stick mixes and pellets, formulated with patented performance ingredients and additives.

It is not just in the UK that Nash is held up by anglers as the market leader and innovator in carp bait products – Nashbait is now being exported to France, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy and Poland, and Nash has plans to add more overseas territories to this list.

In 2012, exporting to Europe suddenly became more complicated for Nash, following a crackdown by European labelling regulators. Nash had never previously included a full ingredient list on any of its pouches, and had been using the same generic back-of-pack wording on its exported baits as it was using for the UK market. However, the authorities made it clear this approach would no longer be acceptable – fishing bait products had to carry a description and full list of ingredients in the relevant European language.

For Nash, with its vast range of products, the implications of this were massive.

“We had to be legal to carry on trading in Europe. This meant we needed a means of printing language variants of lots of different packs – fast,” recalls Gary Bayes, operations director at Nash Tackle.

A word of mouth recommendation led Nash to Rotech, a Hertfordshire-based offline coding and marking systems specialist. Given the urgency of Nash’s situation, Rotech immediately set about modifying a demo model, and within two weeks, Nash had taken delivery of a customised RF1 offline coding system with vacuum pouch feeder and a BELL-MARK EasyPrint C thermal transfer printhead.

Whereas most offline coders use a friction feeder to drive the bottom sleeve or carton from the stack for printing, this method doesn’t work for difficult-to-feed flexible pouches, as Rotech director Richard Pether explains: “If you try to draw off the bottom bag from a stack by use of friction you will only succeed in moving the entire stack,” he says. “For this reason, a lot of coding equipment suppliers avoid offline pouch coding. Our solution has been to develop a unique stack to stack system that uses versatile vacuum pick and place technology to feed and print pouches at speeds of between 20 and 30 per minute. The RF1 works from the top of the stack down, picking the top bag and placing it on an integral conveyor for printing, prior to being stacked again.”

At Nash’s bait factory, the RF1 coder has made it possible for the company to overprint pre-made pouches with over 3,000 slightly different versions of back-of-pack information and bar codes, on demand – satisfying regulators without compromising production efficiency.

“We needed the ability to print large amounts of variable information onto different sized bags, and the flexibility to print these bags on demand. Rotech’s system has delivered on both counts – catering for the extremely broad product range we supply and the markets we serve,” says Gary.

Nash buys in pre-made branded pouches that are non product specific and have a blank area on the back for printing ingredient lists, bar codes, date codes and batch codes. Nash prints labels with the product name and code in-house on a desktop printer and applies them to the pouches, before passing the pouches through the RF1 to print back-of-pack information, bar codes, date codes and batch codes.

The pouches, which range from 200g up to 5kg, are fed into the coding system in batches of 100. In the space of five minutes, each pack in the batch is accurately and clearly printed.

“The print quality is awesome,” enthuses Gary. “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 is impressed with the reliability of the RF1 too. It is running off 5,000 bags per week, and, according to Gary, “just keeps on going and going”.

“We’ve had to replace some bearings and disposables and had the printhead taken away for a service, as you would expect, but Rotech’s speed of response has been quick,” he says.

Nash also had to enlist Rotech’s assistance when it introduced a new PET/LDPE pouch material that didn’t seem to want to run on the system.

“Rotech’s support was superb. They tested loads of different ribbons until they found the right one. They also altered the way the machine was picking up the bags to enable it to run the new pouches,” says Gary.

Now, Nash is confident that they have a future-proof system that can overprint whatever information they want on their pouches, and in whatever language they want it – which is likely to come in useful given the company’s ambitions to expand into Japan, the USA and more European countries.

“We needed flexibility and thanks to Rotech, that’s exactly what we got. The only thing holding us back now is the amount of memory in my computer for storing all the data,” jokes Gary.