Wine packer solves coding and marking dilemma

Wine bottler and packer, Kingsland Wines and Spirits, supply wines for most major UK retailers: laser marking with batch codes on the bottles meets their speed and legibility requirements

Since switching from continuous ink jet marking (CIJ) to laser marking in 2004, Kingsland Wines and Spirits have been able to overcome legibility problems that were associated with the previous ink marking on glass, and substantially increase line uptime.

This has as prompted the addition of a new machine from Vespalase, the laser division of coding and marking specialist Euromark.

Kingsland engineering manager, Nigel Smith explained, "This is an exceptionally high volume bottling operation and our retail customers require us to mark product with batch codes for traceability.

Previously, we were coding and marking the necks of bottles using CIJ printers.

The clarity and legibility of these marks was an issue, especially on bottles of red wine.

We now laser mark the base of the bottle to meet our customer need for a discreet, but legible, permanent mark.

Customers can find the marks easily and tell us they are useful in managing stock rotation".

The Vespalase lasers can solve a range of packaging coding and marking problems.

In addition to marking glass, metal, ceramics and other challenging materials, Vespalase lasers can be programmed to mark films, foils and card.

Extending laser marking to the cardboard sleeves of bag-in-a-box wine containers is under consideration at Kingsland.

The high speed lasers can mark at a rate up to 1600 characters per second and the absence of fumes from inks and solvents is also an environmental benefit.

The machines offer a wide range of high resolution alpha numeric fonts in addition to conventional and 2D matrix bar codes.

Laser markings are permanent and cannot be erased or overwritten without leaving evidence.

Nigel Smith concluded, "With the old CIJ machines, there was a high cost of consumables and maintenance.

Downtime for maintenance and breakdown was extremely disruptive and costly.

By contrast, the Vespalase lasers have performed flawlessly, requiring no consumables or even routine attention".

Vespalase offer nationwide service and are happy to advise packaging suppliers and their clients on permanent laser coding and marking of products and packaging materials.

The company offers a CO2 (carbon dioxide) laser which has a tube life of 30,000 working hours and a fibre laser which offers an outstanding life of 100,000 hours working life.

For further details please consult the website.

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