One of the dominating trends in the beer market over the past decade has been the explosive growth in craft beers. Especially popular among millennials are flavoured beers featuring novel ingredients and flavours*. Thousands of new breweries have launched to satisfy this surge in demand. With beer increasingly seen as a premium product, even the multinationals are diversifying, offering craft beers alongside their flagship best-sellers.
The impact is evident on the production floor. There’s been a switch from a few, high volume production lines to multiple lines running with smaller batch sizes. And a much greater diversity of beers on the market is matched with a much wider variety in bottle shape, design and glass colours.
So what must the right coding solution deliver to meet breweries’ changing demands?
Low-cost efficiency
Number one: low-cost efficiency and ease -of-use. Commonly used printing technologies such as Continuous Inkjet (CIJ) are maintenance-heavy. When a CIJ printer is switched off, the ink is prone to block the printhead nozzles and cause major issues with the pumps over time. So breweries need trained technicians for their printers and choose to leave them powered up 24/7. This isn’t great for sustainability or overheads. But there is a far less costly alternative.
edding compact printers have been built around clean Thermal Inkjet (TIJ) technology. They’re service-free and maintenance-free, so there’s no need for expensive service contracts. And they can sit idle for as long as needed without a problem, saving up to 80% in electricity consumption compared to CIJ. ,
Expert inks
The ink quality is also critical. For coding on glass beer bottles you need highly adhesive, quick-drying inks that can also withstand refrigeration. Thanks to edding’s ink expertise, that isn’t an issue. edding inks score highly for permanence and adhesion, achieving high resolution, durable coding even in the moist environment of a beer production line.
As beer is sold in a range of clear, amber and green bottles, breweries also have to switch printing inks from black to yellow or white to be easily readable. Traditional industrial printers can only run a single colour ink. But the beauty of edding compact printers is that you can easily run multiple inks on one machine simply by changing ink cartridges within seconds.
Finally, for anyone but the biggest beer producers, space is at a premium on the factory floor. Traditional coding machines such as CIJ printers are big and bulky. Not only are the edding in-line 12 and portable 12 printers small in size, they also sit upon the production line, freeing up valuable floor space.
Easy to use, maintenance-free, service-free; edding compact printers enable breweries to concentrate on what they do best – making great-tasting beer.
To find out more about how edding compact printers can meet your needs, contact us here.
*According to research by Mondor Intelligence