Papa Cantella's is a family owned and operated company based in Vernon, CA, that specializes in premium sausages. Many of its products are vacuum packaged in flexible film and then frozen. Later, the frozen packages have a paperboard sleeve or carton applied. In 2015, after experiencing some difficulties with lot and date coding on folding cartons, the firm decided to replace an existing ink-jet coding machine with an MK-U6000 Series Continuous Ink Jet printer from Keyence (www.keyence.com). Management was so pleased with its performance that the firm now has 11 of them in operation, seven printing black ink and four yellow. Five of the printers are in the production area where primary packaging is done, so the substrate they print on is flexible film. In one application, three of the printers are mounted over a horizontal form/fill/ seal system. They are a replacement for a thermal-transfer printer that traversed across the three-up configuration of primary packages being produced. Because it's no longer necessary to allow time for the traversing to take place, the packages are now produced at a rate of about 8/ min rather than being limited to 5 or 6.
展开▼
