Print & Apply Labelling Machinery at PepsiCo

Logopak, inventors of and the leading innovator in print & apply labelling systems, have recently supplied print & apply labelling machinery for a third line at PepsiCo's concentrate facility in Little Island Cork in the republic of Ireland.

Logopak 804 Labellers

The print & apply labelling equipment supplied for the third high speed production line comprised two Logopak 804 labellers for the application of pre-printed bar code (tracking) labels to the rough corner blocks of wooden pallet bases on their entry to "robot palletisation cells".

The application of labels to rough wooden blocks of pallets required a special material and adhesive combination to allow the label to remain stuck to the block and to give a format that allowed later scanning of the bar code when the completed pallet arrived at the pallet labelling station.

An aluminium/paper combination label was supplied with a very high grab adhesive which allowed adhesion to the vertical and horizontal faces of the corner block of the pallet, and the Logopak 804 labellers were supplied with special applicators which applied the label, then folded it on the second face.

After application, the pallet bases then have containers of Pepsi concentrate loaded onto them and when finished are then transported to a stretch wrapping machine, the base bar code is scanned on entry to the wrapper and then the pallet is tracked through three pallet stop positions until on exit from it the fully wrapped pallet has two GS1 compliant pallet labels applied to adjacent faces by a Logopak 920 PF pallet labeller.

This allowed PepsiCo, to manufacture product on one of two lines for this part of the project, but know exactly what these products were on arrival at the stretchwrapper.

In addition, as PepsiCo already have three other packing lines all of which have Logopak 804 labellers already fitted together with a Logopak 920PF on the wrapper, as a contingency, each of these pallets can be sent to either wrapper if one is down for repair or maintenance.

When the bar code of the pallet base is scanned at entry to the wrapper, the data is uploaded to Pepsi's host system, which looks up further data for the pallet and then downloads it to the pallet labeller for printing.

The installation of these three units brings to a total of three Logopak 920 pallet labellers and seven Logopak 804T base labellers installed in PepsiCo Little Island by Logopak.