Giroux’s Poultry Farm Improves Uptime and Reduces Product Marking Costs by 43%
Industry
Egg
Customer
Giroux's Poultry Farm
Distributor
Van Alstine
Summary
Giroux’s Poultry Farm needed to reduce downtime, operating costs, carton waste, and rejection rates associated with their coding equipment. After reviewing five competitive manufacturer’s printers they chose Hitachi to supply and install 28 Hitachi RX Series Continuous Ink Jet Printers. The result was an immediate improvement in uptime, a 43% reduction in operating costs, and elimination of print related carton waste.
"The Hitachi RX Series has been a great printer and I would recommend it to anybody."
Giroux’s Poultry Farm
Giroux’s Poultry Farm is a 4th generation family owned and operated business that has been producing quality eggs for more than 60 years. Located in the beautiful Champlain Valley, they are dedicated to providing a high quality product through a fully integrated process from their hatchery and feed mill through production, packaging, and distribution.
- Dale Gadway Lead Technician at Giroux’s Poultry Farm
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
SOLUTION
Giroux’s Poultry Farm was using traditional mechanical stampers to date their egg cartons. Their operators were averaging two hours per day aligning and cleaning the print stamps, but still experienced poor print quality. This downtime limited their production capacity and the alignment process resulted in significant carton waste. In addition, the stampers were unable to detect if the carton had failed to close properly resulting in additional carton waste and repackaging time and costs.
Results
Giroux’s Poultry Farm tested the Hitachi RX-SD160W for one week proving the printer could operate without an encoder and detect when a carton had not closed properly. Operating costs were 43% less than their previous coder when considering ink, make-up and scheduled maintenance. Carton waste was eliminated. Impressed with the cost savings, reliability, print quality, and ease of use, as well as the outstanding local support from Van Alstine, they purchased 28 units replacing all their existing stampers.
Van Alstine has extensive experience in providing reliable and cost effective marking and coding solutions to the food packaging industry. Working with Hitachi, they demonstrated the capabilities of the RX Series Continuous Ink Jet Printer to resolve all of the issues Giroux’s Poultry Farm was experiencing with their traditional stampers, including high downtime, operating costs and carton waste. With the solid reputation of Hitachi printers in the food packaging industry, and Van Alstine’s local support and attention to detail, Giroux’s Poultry Farm knew they were making the right choice.
Van Alstine installed 28 RX-SD160W units at the Giroux’s Poultry Farm packaging facility using custom designed mounting brackets, providing the immediate improvement in reliability, print quality, production efficiency and operating costs they required.
