Increasingly, retailers are required to provide more complex labels to meet legislative requirements and to handle the growing consumer interest in the food quality. This demand now extends to the busy supermarket self-service and pre-pack bakery departments where bakery products manufactured in store need to be labelled accurately to inform customers about ingredients, traceability and allergen information.
These labels can contain a wide variety of information, from product type and price to large amounts of ingredients’ text, which demands considerable flexibility from any printing system chosen. Here, Avery Berkel, a leading supplier of retail weighing equipment discusses some of the printing options available to the in-store bakery and examines why accurate labelling can assist with the profitable operation of the store.
Self-Service Bakery
Self-service is becoming a popular method of merchandising products as it conveys an image of freshness and quality within the store environment. In addition, it can release staff usually assigned to the bakery counters to other duties, to assist with workload at peak times in the day.
Typically, it will take an operator ten seconds to identify and process a bakery product at the checkout, but if the customer has already labelled the item with a bar code, it takes just two seconds on average to scan it. This can realise immediate benefits for the store, helping to improve throughput and reduce queuing times at the tills and improve customer satisfaction.
Many retailers are keen to make use of the latest weighing and printing technology to enable customer self-service, but, suggests Avery Berkel, there are a number of areas to consider first.
Firstly, how easy is it for the customer to use the system? A system that is difficult to operate can result in products being labelled inaccurately, which can cause delays at the checkout. Machines from Avery Berkel’s PC-based MP range have an easy-to-read graphics display that enables the user to make product selection by group, item type or by using an A-Z menu, with full on-screen prompts.
Another area to consider is the type of information that the consumer may want to know about the product, which is not practical to print on the shelf label. This can include information about nutritional content, calories and any allergens present. It is worth investing in a system that will allow the customer to recall such additional information easily and quickly and therefore make an informed choice before purchase.
In addition, retailers can use the scale as a point-of-sale marketing tool, by running cross-promotions on associated produce or be allowing the customer to print discount vouchers.
Finally, every scale on the network needs to be easy to integrate with the back office system, so that the supermarket manager can have control over the products and prices displayed, without having to change information on each machine individually. Avery Berkel’s MX software package for example enables simple integration and data management with the store system and allows the retailer to configure the scale to meet exact requirements.
Pre-Pack Bakery
In a typical supermarket bakery, products are prepared and baked early in the morning. Operators may have to create hundreds of identical labels per item, printing each one individually. This is a time-consuming task for staff that need to focus their attention on maintaining sufficient stock levels.
However, there are now a number of printing solutions available for retailers that want to improve the efficiency of the in-store bakery.
Using suitable print manager software, bakery staff can batch non-weighed products together under a meaningful description that can be recalled on a daily or weekly basis. This is especially useful as a means of generating repetitive batch jobs and allows the user to create multiple labels for different products at the press of a single button. Batches can also be stored and modified easily, eliminating repetitive re-entry of product details.
To ensure that products are labelled accurately and compliantly, retailers are also turning to large label printing, which allows additional space for ingredient, allergen and nutritional information.
-ends-
For press information, please contact
Jane Woods/David Spencer
Edson Evers LLP
Telephone +44 (0) 1785 255146.
Email jane@edsonevers.com