Jerky specialist makes digital investment

Glenoaks Food manufactures and packages more than 90 brands of beef, ostrich, turkey, buffalo and venison jerky for sale throughout North America. The company has witnessed the growth in shorter runs and the move by brands to create a more personal one-to-one connection with their customers, often actioned through labels and other printed packaging. As such, Glenoaks Food has invested in digital to allow it to become more flexible with its printing to better accommodate short runs and embrace the trend of personalized communication with consumers. One example of this has seen Glenoaks Food labeling jerky for a chain of microbreweries, with short runs of 1,000 labels often divided among eight specific brands for the microbreweries.

‘The problem we’ve historically had with having more than 600 SKUs is that many of them have full art digital color labels we have to run that are always unique to the customers,’ said John J.W. Fallon III, president of Glenoaks Food. ‘We have so many private label customers that we had to find an effective way to accommodate them on short runs and long runs.

‘The brand-specific labels can’t be printed conventionally because they’d have to buy all of those plates, and that is not cost effective,’ continued Fallon. ‘But we can go into industries, such as microbreweries, and change flavors and other elements on the labels quickly, and that’s made possible due to our CDT printers.’

CDT 1600 Series C Industrial Class printers are designed to make print-on-demand applications more efficient, accurate and cost effective. The digital color inkjet printers are powered by Memjet technology, which can print full variable color up to 1600 x 1600 DPI, and at throughput speeds up to 12 inches per second.

Prior to purchasing the CDT 1600 Series C units, Glenoaks Food used a variety of platforms to print labels in-house, with the process often taking several days to complete, and not as responsive and flexible as often required. Installed in January 2014, Glenoaks Food now uses one of its CDT 1600 Series C units to print more colorful, full-art labels for the front of packs, while the second is used for printing the backside labels with UPC and nutritional information. The versatility of the CDT 1600 Series C units also allows the company to print directly from platforms such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW and others. The ability to quickly print labels is helpful when any new USDA regulations are mandated, which often require changes to the fine print on the labels.

‘I can print labels from many programs,’ said Fallon. ‘I send them directly to the printer; I keep libraries of the PDF files so that other people can just send them directly to the printer as well.

‘When we have a regulation issue, or if a customer makes a special request, we need to respond. The reason why digital printing is better is because it’s faster, and I think it looks better. It definitely saves us a lot in labor and speeds up the whole process. It gives us control over what we’re doing. We’re very pleased with our CDT printers.’

Watch Glenoaks Food talk about its use of digital printing to meet modern market demands here