Markem coder slashes times for chocolate firm

The Thorntons factory in Alfreton, Derbyshire installed the coder after it impressed engineers in product trials.

“With the old rotary coder, it took around 15 minutes to change over each batch, because we had to wait for the barrel to cool down and for the brass lettering to be changed manually,” said technical process manager Mark Campion. “Now the changeover is virtually automatic and it has allowed us to ramp up our product output significantly.”

Thorntons is now printing an estimated 500,000 bars/week at 300 packs/min and ribbon speeds of 1,000mm/sec at the Alfreton factory.

The coder (pictured) is being used to continuously print ‘best before’ dates and traceability data on 25 different varieties of chocolate bar 24 hours/day, six days/week. It automatically calculates the ‘best before’ dates using pre-set formulas, thus reducing human error caused by manual inputting. Traceability is also improved because the coder prints the precise date and time of packaging on each bar.

Meanwhile, the speeds at which the coder can operate means that ribbon usage is kept to a minimum, while still maintaining print quality.

“The length of the code being printed has been reduced from 30mm to 20mm, reducing our ribbon costs by a third,” said Campion.

In all, Thorntons has estimated it can produce an additional 1m chocolate bars/year due to the various efficiency savings.

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