Associated Milk Products Inc. (AMPI), a dairy cooperative owned by more than 4,600 dairy farms in the upper Midwest, produces cheese loaves and bricks as well as shredded cheese for commercial and institutional customers and the federal government.

Such a wide-ranging customer base and varied product line means AMPI's packaging lines are constantly running multiple products for multiple companies. And each carton it packages can require different information. To manage customers' needs and ensure accuracy, the manufacturer implemented versatile ink-jet marking and labeling systems in its 14 plants.

"We needed a system that would ensure high-quality printing and labeling with the specific time, data and information required for each product and customer," says Todd Turner, project coordinator at AMPI's Portage, Wis. plant.

At its processed cheese packaging lines, AMPI installed ink-jet printers to mark a variety of information on each carton. The systems fulfill all of the manufacturer's identification and production needs by producing high-resolution bar codes, text and graphics in a range of sizes and formats.

On one line, the marking engine codes the lot number, sell-by-date and packaging line number along the side of a corrugated carton. At a second line, four lines of text including lot number, company name, product description, plant number and date of packaging are marked on cartons. Another line codes the top flap of a carton with multi-line information.

Whatever the requirement, AMPI's ink-jet systems maintain production rates of 10 to 12 cartons a minute, says Turner. To ensure consecutive date and time codes are consistently marked on cartons, the packaging lines are networked into a PC-compatible program. This allows staff to create coding formats for all packaging lines using information from the company's product database.

AMPI also installed a label printer/applicator at its brick and shredded cheese packaging lines where two sides of a carton must be marked instead of just one. More cost-efficient than two ink-jet coders, the twin-tamp printer/applicator automatically applies 4 × 4 inch pressure-sensitive labels to adjacent carton panels using the tamp-blow method.

"The flexibility of both the ink-jet and labeling systems is what's most valuable to our operation," says Turner. "They have helped us save a great deal of time and money while meeting the various product identification requirements of each of our customers."