Walkers Midshire 'beef up' production with Toshiba B-SA4 Industrial Printers

Functional and robust the B-SA4 industrial barcode printer meets high volume printing demands

Walkers Midshire Foods, the award winning producer of sausages and traditional cooked meats has recently expanded its operation and has again chosen a Toshiba product, the new B-SA4 industrial bar code printer, to meet its growing demand for increased label production.  Toshiba's B-SA4 provides both the functionality and robustness to meet the high demands of the company's large weekly label requirement.

Walkers Midshire sausages are produced under retailer's own brands, customers include Tesco's and other leading UK supermarket chains. The company produces a vast amount of packed sausages every week, these need to be packaged, labelled, boxed and dispatched to meet the stringent delivery requirements imposed by the major retailers. The process needs to be seemless as bottlenecks could delay delivery and potentially lead to the order be rejected by the retailer.

The company was already using a Toshiba B-472 printer for labelling outer box cartons, the printers were reliable  and consistently produced easy to read barcoded labels which allowed Walkers Midshire to meet the demands and specific needs of their customers.  

However, with its expansion Walkers Midshire realised that they would need new printers to cope with the weekly  increase in production together with peak period increases particularly during the summer months and at Christmas.   The printing solution was critical to the delivery of 'on-time' product to customers. Therefore, it was essential that any new equipment was able to produce the range of labels needed for product packaging, was robust, reliable and had  the capacity to print the high volume of labels required each week.

 "We had been using the Toshiba B-472 printer for 6 years it was very reliable and accurate, but our growth required us to look for a new solution."   explained Ivan Martin, who oversees label production for Walkers Midshire.  "We briefly trialed another product, in fact it was from a competitor of Toshiba's, but found it unreliable and the quality of output was poor - down time in our business just isn't an option!"

Martin continues, 'Our supplier Ampersand recommended the Toshiba B-SA4, once installed we were able to see immediate improvements  - it easily coped with and met the high demands of the company's weekly label requirement with no delays, problems or rejections -  operating for some 16 hours a day."

The B-SA4  300 dpi print head guarantees accurate quality labels and has the  functionality to print the variable information required by the customer. Simple to use the printer can be operated by any member of staff thus reducing the possibilities of bottlenecks during peak production periods.

"The re-assurance of such a dependable solution enables me to concentrate on other areas of the business without having to think about product reliability." said Ivan   "The exceptional performance means we have capacity to increase production for seasonal demand without worrying about the capabilities of the printer. The advanced functionality allows us to use the printer for other applications without having to purchase additional hardware.
It is an extremely reliable product and consistently performs outstandingly, having trialed and experienced a competitor's product quite honestly we would not look back "

And the future is bright, Walkers Midshire have big expansion plans which include extending their current packing lines to include additional Toshiba products. The exceptional networking capabilities of the B-SA4 printer series will enable the company to manage the whole network of printers from one central source. The current Toshiba B-SA4 printer is so critical to the business operation of Walkers Midshire that staff have affectionately named her 'Sheila'!