food Marketing - Technology 4/2023
food Marketing & Technology is the international magazine for executives and specialists in the food industry.
food Marketing & Technology is the international magazine for executives and specialists in the food industry.
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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>