How fast should a large company's production lines go? Ask a Krispy Kreme doughnut lover, and the answer might be, "As fast as humanly possible."
Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corporation, based in Winston-Salem, N.C., makes more than 5 million doughnuts daily in its North American shops, and the firm sells more to grocery and convenience stores. In fact, the franchise chain produces enough doughnuts in a week to line them up from New York to Los Angeles.
A sweet-toothed driver who passes a Krispy Kreme shop and spots a glowing, red light in the store's window probably realizes the "hot light" signals good news: a new batch of Original Glazed doughnuts (first made in 1937) are coming out of the oven. Wholesale bakeries supply the stores with boxes of the treats. In these bakeries, a new, customized labeling/ bar coding solution speeds the goodies to their destinations. A unique printer/applicator that includes a durable print engine keys the stand-alone system.
The Main Ingredients
Like the ingredients used to make doughnuts, the start of the labeling solution has humble beginnings. Ellington, Conn.-based supplier Action Packaging Systems mailed one of its regular marketing pieces, looking for business. The firm supplies labels and labelers, including its Gold Seal tamp/blow printer/applicator unit, to a variety of customers nationwide.
A distributorship that received the marketing piece and had an existing relationship with Krispy Kreme talked to Doug Rice, Action Packaging Systems' president, about a possible new labeling solution for the doughnut maker. Rice went to Krispy Kreme's headquarters in Winston-Salem and learned the firm needed a way to quickly and accurately place round, variable-information labels on different-sized doughnut boxes as they came to the end of bakeries' conveyor lines. Company employees were hand-applying the labels.
Krispy Kreme tested several labeling solutions, but Rice was confident he had the right one--a customized Gold Seal unit. He was so confident, he built a prototype, even painting it the distinctive Krispy Kreme green. "I just felt really good about this one," he says.
Rice's judgment paid off. Krispy Kreme executives liked the Gold Seal printer/applicator's simplicity. The machine operates with only two buttons and lacks complex knobs, gauges or switches. "It's what we call 'second-shift-proof,'" Rice says. The semiautomatic system is self-contained on a cart and packaged with an air compressor, a vacuum pump and electrical components in a cabinet underneath the unit. Wires run from the cabinet to the unit's junction box. The unit also includes a drawer containing a keypad. "It's very portable, and that's important," says Tim Honeycutt, vice president of purchasing for Krispy Kreme and a Certified Purchasing Manager. "We use our production areas for a variety of products, and not all of them need the printer there. So we can roll it in or out as needed."
Durability of the labeling equipment was an important consideration for Krispy Kreme because bakeries can be dusty and production areas are washed regularly. The Gold Seal's direct thermal, SATO M-8459Se Series print engine from Charlotte, N.C.-based bar code equipment supplier SATO America Inc. plays an important role, Rice says. The print engine prints in 203 d.p.i. resolution, with a maximum print width of 4.4 inches, and at print speeds up to five inches per second. "It accepts jobs on the go faster than others," Rice says.
Approximately six weeks after Rice's meeting with Krispy Kreme, special printer/applicators began applying labels in the company's wholesale bakeries. Currently, more than 30 units are streamlining production for the firm's suppliers, Rice says.
The Satisfying Result
Each round, 1 1/2-inch label Krispy Kreme hand-applied to different-sized doughnut boxes included a price, sell-by date and store number in addition to preprinted graphics. "It was very labor-intensive, and there was a lack of standardized presentation of the product," Honeycutt says. "These [printer/ applicators] sped up the production, gave us consistent placement and proper placement on the box, and improved the look of the brand."
In Krispy Kreme's wholesale bakeries, one printer/applicator is assigned to each line. The number of lines varies, but most bakeries working with the company have between one and three Gold Seal units. As freshly boxed doughnuts come down conveyor lines (at an average rate of 20 dozen boxes per minute), workers place each box under the applicator. When they do, a PRINTPAD™ bar code printing terminal from Greensboro, N.C.-based software provider TEKLYNX International enables workers to key in the price and sell-by date when prompted by the system. The PRINTPAD, which is connected to the Gold Seal unit, is preprogrammed with all non-variable label data downloaded from a computer running TEKLYNX' LABELVIEW™ bar code labeling and integration software. The PRINTPAD feeds that data, plus the store number, to the printer. The printer creates the label. A tamp/blow application completes the cycle, adjusting instantly for different-sized boxes (its stroke ranges from 1/2 inch to 4 inches). Workers store labeled boxes on a rack for shipping.
The essential step of getting the computer data into the unit was something Rice hadn't encountered before. "I said, 'Well, I'm not sure how to do that, but I'll figure it out,'" he says. Rice credits Bob Lanzendorf, SATO's OEM sales and marketing manager, for suggesting use of the PRINTPAD. Action Packaging Systems programs the keypad/terminals using a PC, storing all essential label data in it so the Gold Seal units are ready to ship. The company also now supplies the round labels--approximately 100 million annually.
"The Action Packaging folks were very customer-oriented and extremely responsive," Honeycutt says. "They took our ideas and requests and came back with a product that met those. It's user-friendly, to use an old term, but customized for things unique to our business. We've invested a lot here, but are getting a good return on our investment."
What could be sweeter?
Darin Painter is managing editor of Print Solutions. Email him your comments at dpainter@PSDA.org.
3 Tips for Selling Bar Coding
1. Know the codes. More than 260 bar code symbologies exist. Familiarize yourself with the most widely used ones such as Code 39, Codabar, Interleaved 2 of 5 and Code 128. Understanding which symbologies can encode letters, numbers and punctuation, and which are fixed versus variable length, allows you to select the ideal one for your application.
2. Meet the standards. Acquire a copy of ANSI standards for the bar code symbologies you sell. If your clients are involved in manufacturing or retail, you may need to work with their compliance programs. Many firms dictate specifications to make their receiving and inventory methods more efficient. Guidelines often dictate specifications such as what paper stocks to use, where bar codes must be placed on products and what size bar codes to use.
3. Research. A good book to read is Getting Started With Bar
Codes: A Systematic Guide by Richard D. Bushnell and Richard B. Meyers ($89.95
at www.amazon.com). Also, check out Uniform Code Council Inc.'s web site at www.uc-council.org.
