Hitachi
  • Manufacturing

While Reducing Print Costs and Downtime, Baker Cheese Meets Consumer Expectations with Consistent and Exceptional Code Dates

Located in the heart of cheese country, you'll find Baker Cheese; a 4th generation cheese producer. Baker Cheese pioneered the production of high quality string cheese and has been a leading national producer for almost four decades. They take pride in the freshness of their cheese, owing that freshness to an astounding 48 hour farm to consumer ready process. This commitment to freshness and quality has been meet with many awards and accolades from critics and consumers alike.

Baker Cheese needed to reduce downtime and increase print consistency in order to meet consumer expectations. After two weeks of head-to-head trials, they selected Hitachi RX Series Continuous Inkjet Printers as the clear winner. The result was an immediate improvement in uptime, decreased print costs, reliable and consistent code dates allowing Baker Cheese to continue as one of America’s favorite string cheese producers.

We put it through the ringer on our toughest applications, and it was a slam dunk!

Brian Baker
President, Baker Cheese

Overview

  • Challenge
    Costly existing print set up wasn't in sync with the Baker Cheese standards and lacked consistency.
  • Solution
    The Hitachi RX Series Printers: Consistent, cost-effective and bulletproof
  • Result
    With printing and production now working in tandem, Baker Cheese witnessed some exceptional results

Customer
Baker Cheese

Region
U.S.A.

Products & Services
Continuous Inkjet Printers

Distributor
Hitachi Industrial Equipment Marking Solutions Inc. (Formerly IMS-Partners)

Industries
Packaged Food

Release Date
August, 2016

Solutions By
Hitachi America, Ltd.

Challenge

Baker Cheese produces close to 3 million sticks of string cheese each day making any downtime extremely costly. Their previous coding equipment was becoming very costly and wasn’t able to deliver the print consistency needed to compliment the quality of their product. An easy-to-use printer was needed that could produce high quality prints within a small print window as part of an intermittent motion production process.

Solution

After a two week head-to-head trial with multiple competitive printers, it was clear that Hitachi printers were able to not only meet but exceed Baker Cheese’s printer needs. Baker Cheese chose IMS Partners to supply Hitachi RX Series Continuous Inkjet Printers. IMS Partners was able to assist Baker Cheese in developing a print solution to match their current production processes allowing Baker Cheese to see an immediate decrease in downtime and an increase in print consistency that exceeded expectations.

Dale Tetziaff

Dale Tetziaff
Hitachi Industrial Equipment Marking
Solutions Inc. (Formerly IMS-Partners)
2730 Greenleaf Avenue, Elk Grove
Village, IL 60007
Office : 847-956-6600
Dale.Tetzlaff@Hitachi-IMS.com

Hitachi America, Ltd. Industrial Components and Equipment Division

Hitachi America, Ltd. Industrial Components and Equipment Division
Marking and Coding Solutions Group
6901 Northpark Blvd.
Charlotte, NC 28216
1-866-583-0048
InkJet-printers@hal.hitachi.com

The Hitachi RX Series Printers have been bulletproof,exceeding expectations for our application.

Jim Guell
Maintenance Manager, Baker Cheese

Result

Not only were the Hitachi RX Continuous Inkjet Printers able to decrease downtime, but they virtually eliminated it. Along with this improved output, the new Hitachi printers reduced printer costs and took an average code date look and turned it into an exceptional code date look. This helped meet consumer expectations and continue to fortify Baker Cheese’s position as one of the top string cheese producers in the US year after year.