If you’re like many small to medium-sized business owners in the grocery industry, you probably have a special room or shelf where you keep your labels. You know, the 10,000 or 15,000 pre-printed labels that you order from your local printer. And that’s a minimum order. You might also have amassed a bunch of labels you’ll never use. Maybe because there is one piece of information on them that is wrong, or because the size that isn’t right. Or maybe your customer suddenly decided that the colour had to be changed. This is when you should be thinking seriously about in-house label printing, using a digital inkjet printer.
In-house label printing: on demand, anytime, easily
Perhaps your thinking “I don’t have time to learn how print something as high-quality as what my printer shop provides me.” But guess what? Many printers in business today do short runs on digital inkjet printers. Why? Because these printers are simple and inexpensive to run and can produce very impressive results. Moreover, the printer shop can change the content of what’s on the label in a matter of seconds, because it’s a digital printer. It prints an image. The image comes from a software that generates the printing file. They change the image file in their software and then send it to print. And it’s as simple as sending a document goes to an office printer.
So the question is why wouldn’t you get one of these for yourself?
After all, you are probably already using a black and white thermal printer for some of your labels, like the ones that don’t necessarily need colour. These could be the nutrition table, the ingredients and the list of allergens. If you can already create those kind of labels, you can certainly operate a digital colour inkjet label printer.
A couple more advantages
Still skeptical about in-house printing? Think about the time spent and the amount of people involved in proofing and adjusting a flexo label. Printing a proof, validating it, asking for changes, getting the new proof. These process sometimes gets repeated several times, with a physical print out every time. With a digital inkjet printer, all you have to do is get the appropriate people to look at the electronic file make the adjustements in the file and when you’re ready, hit print. You can print one, or 15,000.
Also, how dependant are you on your printer shop’s schedule? Did They just tell you it will take them 3-4 weeks to process your order because they are swamped? If you had a digital inkjet printer, you could do your run on the spot any time you wanted.
Conclusion
IMS can provide you with a full line up of digital inkjet printer choices as well as expert advice on what model would be best for your in-house label printing needs. Have a look at our latest printer buying guide or contact us directly if you have any questions. We’ll be happy to help get on with your printing!