Low-cost system for dairy coding

This is an application story about the installation of 1 x ci500 MEK based system for Bethesda Milk, Pembrokeshire.

Bethesda Milk is a 40 acre farm, which 5 years ago made the move into dairying. Since October 2002 the business has been selling milk direct to the public and in local shops under the Llaeth Bethesda brand. More recently, Bethesda Milk expanded its product range and now also makes butter.

The Customer Requirements

Until recently, producing milk was extremely hard work, with the bottling process done by hand in seven hour stints. However, having since invested in a milk bottling and labelling machine capable of turning out 2,000 bottles of milk an hour, a major improvement has been made.

With this improvement came the requirement for better quality, more legible traceability codes to be applied to the products. Their traditional method of using a contact printer was not satisfactory due to the extremely poor quality of code produced and was also proving labour intensive due to the manual intervention required to alter dates and codes. Being an ambitious business and realising that full traceability is essential, Bethesda Milk identified ink jet as the best solution and contacted The Needham Group for help.

The Needham Group Proposal

Despite ink jet identified as the ideal solution, being only a small business they were unsure as to whether it was an affordable option. However, with only a simple single line code required to be printed onto the caps of the bottles, the low cost entry level ci500 system was suited to the application.

Knowing this, a demonstration of the ci500 was conducted and the system then left with the customer for a week’s trial. Having evaluated the capabilities and costs of operating the system and experienced the benefits of CIJ over traditional contact printing methods, Bethesda Milk immediately placed an order for 1 x ci500.

Customer Quote

“The ci500 system has made life much easier at the dairy and most importantly it was not as expensive as I anticipated. The quality of code is far greater than before, customers are now actually able to read it, and not having to manually set new dates each day has saved me a lot of time and bother. It is definitely a step forward into the 21st century for us”.

For more information please contact us on 01948 662629 or by Email

Go back to the main installations page