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food Marketing - Technology 4/2023

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Packaging<br />

Artisan Master Baker Selects Label<br />

Verification Data Master<br />

When Leicestershire craft bakery Geary’s sought a retail-compliant label verification system, they called upon<br />

industry specialist Jenton Dimaco.<br />

Producing one million loaves and more than five million rolls weekly, as part of their dual-site modernisation<br />

plan, the family-run firm has now made the switch from labor and time-intensive manual verification checks<br />

to an efficient and future-proof offline Dimaco label verification system<br />

Established in 1906, Geary’s has<br />

remained family-run throughout four<br />

generations. In 2018, the master baking<br />

firm received £15m of investment to<br />

support its development of a new,<br />

purpose-built factory in Leicester.<br />

Offering a wide range of SKUs, the<br />

high-quality BRCGS-approved and AA+<br />

artisan bakery realized that in order to<br />

keep pace with its exponential growth<br />

and new retailer stockists, a robust label<br />

verification solution that could scale up<br />

alongside their expansion plans was<br />

required.<br />

Now stocked by most British supermarkets,<br />

including Tesco, Waitrose,<br />

M&S, Ocado, and its longstanding<br />

biggest customer, Aldi – in May 2022<br />

Geary’s Technical Manager Karen<br />

Walters started to scope out the<br />

company’s future label verification<br />

options. One quick web search later<br />

and Dimaco was in the door. By July, the<br />

CapEx budget was confirmed and two<br />

offline semi-automated OCR Veri-PACK<br />

label verification vision units together<br />

with a Veri-CENTRAL SQL server were<br />

installed at the Barrow-upon-Soar site.<br />

Indicative of their satisfaction, this<br />

March, a replica solution, comprising<br />

another two units and database, went<br />

live at Geary’s Glenfield site.<br />

Given the multiple variants of craft<br />

bakery products, comprising bloomers,<br />

rustics, malted loaves and the latest<br />

- Jason’s Sourdough, named after the<br />

company’s master baker and Executive<br />

Director Jason Geary - the semiautomated<br />

offline solution catered to<br />

the bakeries’ immediate needs.<br />

The risk of mislabelling is generally<br />

higher on shorter product runs involving<br />

multiple packaging types, notes Dimaco<br />

Sales Director Steve Wainwright.<br />

He expands: “Geary’s bake in small<br />

batches. Because of these short-run<br />

lines, there tends to be multiple product<br />

changeovers per day. Geary’s was also<br />

dealing with varied packaging shapes,<br />

Traditional, artisanal, and dedicated to quality over quantity, Geary’s bakery has made the switch from<br />

labor and time-intensive manual verification checks to an efficient and future-proof offline Dimaco<br />

label verification system.<br />

flexible packaging, labels on sticky bags,<br />

as well as closure tags systems. Coupled<br />

with supplying multiple products to<br />

multiple customers, manual label<br />

checks was fast becoming untenable.<br />

“Ensuring that the label used on each and<br />

every product matches the work order,<br />

printing them in real-time to ensure<br />

there’s no mix up, and linking this to the<br />

database and live MRP system, helps to<br />

significantly reduce human errors,” adds<br />

Steve.<br />

Batch checking<br />

Proofing labels, gathering physical<br />

copies at regular intervals – hourly, at the<br />

start of production and for every bread<br />

batch changeover – had reached an<br />

unsustainable tipping point for Geary’s.<br />

It was proving to be both labor intensive,<br />

challenging to resource and generated<br />

volumes of worksheets which had to<br />

be archived for years, reflects Geary’s<br />

Technical Manager Karen Walters.<br />

Simply by eliminating the paperwork<br />

element and moving to batch checks<br />

performed at the same intervals on<br />

two Veri-PACK units, Karen confirmed<br />

that both bakery sites have observed<br />

significant savings.<br />

“Paper records are always more<br />

vulnerable to being misplaced. They are<br />

also time consuming to retrieve. In the<br />

event of a label recall or audit, speed is<br />

of the essence,” adds Karen.<br />

At the first site, as well as the subsequent<br />

second location, Geary’s placed their<br />

two offline Veri-PACK units close to the<br />

product lines. Every half hour, at the start<br />

and end of each product changeover,<br />

and after a line stop exceeding 5<br />

minutes, a user inserts the pack into a<br />

Veri-PACK unit, logs in and electronically<br />

verifies all the label data against the<br />

34<br />

<strong>food</strong> <strong>Marketing</strong> & <strong>Technology</strong> • August <strong>2023</strong>

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