Coders meet specialist needs

Micromix develops chemical formulations and manufactures a wide range of crop and plant nutrition products, as well as offering a contract packing operation.  As a result, it has a variety of coding requirements for different pack formats including bottles, buckets and boxes.

The company had previously used an alternative CIJ coder, which had proved unreliable and was messy to operate. Hand applied labels, meanwhile, were inflexible, offered a limited area for printed information and carried the risk of coming off the containers. This was a particular concern for certain herbicides and pesticides, where regulations require long-lasting batch and traceability codes. Micromix was also seeing demands from customers for enhanced product branding through better quality codes.

The Linx 8900 has the flexibility to print crisp and durable single, two and three line codes in line with Micromix’s different requirements. The coder can print in any orientation, for example on the neck of a bottle, on the side or underneath, and can easily be moved around the factory in line with changing production requirements. 

The printer is able to code onto both plastic (HDPE and PET) and cardboard substrates. For certain products, one Linx 8900 is used to print the same batch code onto bottles and the boxes into which they are then packed. The coders use Linx Black mixed base ink 3103 as recommended by Linx.  This is said to provide excellent adherence and durability across all substrates and is also highly resistant to removal by a variety of substances including acid, alkali, detergent, petrol and water. 

“Our operators really like the 8900s,” Micromix’s works manager Chris Hardy said. “They are easy to programme, and print every time without fail, so the bottles are going through more quickly and smoothly, and the printing is a lot neater and more readable than our old batch printers.”