The rapid development of ready-to-eat food packaging has been a major driver in the development of MARKEM’s latest coders. Successful suppliers insist on performance, reliability and versatility and the new SmartDate 5 ‘advance’ was designed with this in mind.

Changing demographics has not only affected the food we eat, but also the way it is packaged. Check out any city centre coffee or sandwich shop, any motorway services, railway or bus station and you’ll find a wide range of fresh, ready-to-eat food products, packaged for consumer convenience and attractively displayed. Sandwiches in hinged tamper-evident plastic packs, ready-prepared salads – complete with dressing - in sealed trays, vacuum packed fruit, flow-wrapped pastries, snack-foods in bags, pasta in clam-shell packs…a huge variety of products and packaging styles.

With very few exceptions, packaged foodstuffs have, by law, to carry expiry dates, printed on-line as the product is packaged. For chilled and short shelf-life products, it’s obviously essential that these are accurate, but there’s far more to coding than getting the dates right. For instance an over-printed code could contain the following information:

• • Display and consumption dates.


• • Batch codes – for traceability.


• • Exact time of packaging.


• • Product details and dietary information.


• • Price, including weigh/price calculations.


• • Retail bar code.


• • Promotional messages.


• • Supplier code, country of origin etc.

This product and package diversity has been a major factor in the new SmartDate 5 advance coders developed by MARKEM. Using the latest thermal transfer printing technology, they claim to be the most versatile coders of their type available today. They can be used in either ‘continuous’ or ‘intermittent’ mode, printing onto wrappers, sleeves, bags, labels and other flexible materials. Manufacturers can operate them from a colour touch-screen, a conventional control box or, using simple networking connectivity, from a remote PC or database.

In terms of performance, uptime and print economy, the SmartDate 5 advance offers market-leading standards. Its 1000mm/second print speed keeps pace with the fastest production lines, print set-up is fast and easy, and the 0.5mm gap between prints delivers more codes from every metre of printing ribbon..