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For a contract packer, as for any business owner or manager, time is always of the essence and a hundred little stresses can be worrying you at any moment. Whether about meeting a deadline, coping with changes, or the possibility of an employee making a costly error, it’s enough to keep anyone awake at night! But one effective way to get a good night’s sleep is to invest in a quality coding and marking solution. Surely not, you might think, but let us explain why…

“Our coder needs to be reliable as a pulse” – so said the Director of a contract packing company recently when we asked him for his views on coding and marking. And as we nodded enthusiastically and noted down his answer in our efforts to understand the changing needs of our customers, this got us thinking…

The Industrial Internet of Things, or IIoT, is a common buzz-term in manufacturing today. But for many companies, the images of vast, automated factories that it suggests can be as confusing and alienating as they are intriguing. As such, despite the unignorable benefits it offers them, many small-to-medium-sized businesses are still put off by the idea of the IIoT.

First of all – what is IoT, or Internet of Things?

In brief, IoT refers to the connection of appliances which can then be accessed via smart devices such as phones or laptops. 

We get it: as a drinks producer, coding and marking is not always at the forefront of your mind. It is much more likely that you spend your days thinking about subtle flavourings and attractive packaging, meeting production deadlines and creating ingenious marketing campaigns – and that’s understandable. It is easy to take something like coding and marking for granted, perhaps by underspending in that area or not replacing an old machine. And why not?

As the alcoholic drinks industry reverses global declines of recent years and UK alcohol exports enjoy strong growth, there is one phenomenon that continues to dog the sector: counterfeiting.

Production downtime costs Britain’s manufacturers more than £180bn each year. With the price of raw ingredients rising, and increasing pressure to reduce sugar in Brits’ diets, confectionery manufacturers must find new ways to improve efficiency to facilitate growth.

Maybe we have more bad days in the UK than our friends on the continent because we are the largest consumer of snacks in Europe.  Habits are changing though and there has been a noticeable move to more healthy snacks. This might account for the fact that confectionery sales have not been as buoyant in recent years, although 2017 did buck a five-year decline with an increase in revenues, and sales forecasts for 2018 are continuing this positive trend.

As we see signs of tentative growth in the confectionery industry, it may be time to re-evaluate your production machinery and check that it is still up to the job.

There are a range of confectionery coding technologies that can be used to apply your best before date and batch code onto your bars, bags and boxes of candy, but which is right for you?

On the 28th March 2018, the UK government gave the green light to the bottle Deposit Return Scheme (DRS). Similar schemes have been rolled out in 38 countries including Sweden, Germany and Norway, where 95% of plastic bottles have been recycled since the scheme was introduced in 1999.