Using ink jet coding "a cup of tea" for Traditional Medicinals

Traditional Medicinals, based in Northern California’s Sonoma County, manufactures, packages, and sells over 1.5 million boxes of medicinal herb teas every year.

In business for nearly twenty-eight years, Traditional Medicinals produces its teas under guidelines set by the FDA’s Drug Good Manufacturing Practices for dietary supplements.

These governmental regulations, along with Traditional Medicinals’ own strict policies to provide only the highest quality teas, require the company to take extra care in identifying its product. For help, the company turned to Weber Marking Systems, Inc., of Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Case Coding
Traditional Medicinals has integrated Weber’s high-resolution LegiJet® ML500 ink jet coder as part of its packaging system. Cartons of tea exiting from each of their tea machines travel down a conveyor system to case pack erectors. The cartons of tea are automatically case packed and taped.

The sealed case then moves on a conveyor past the ML500, where its side is marked with two lines of type in a single pass in188-dpi. The top line is the name of the product at .75" high; the second line contains the expiration date at .5", the lot number at .75", and the UPC number at .375" in height.

Currently, the system runs at six to ten cases a minute, with the ML500 capable of coding at speeds up to 180 feet per minute. While at this time only printing simple black text, the ML500 also is capable of printing graphics and bar codes in several colors.

“The Weber system was purchased to replace a different ink jet system we had a lot of problems with,” explains Joe Kopriva, Traditional Medicinals’ Vice President of Operations. “On the recycled corrugated cases we use, coding can be difficult. The ML500 text is clear and bold and easy to read, even from a distance. We plan on adding bar codes to the cases and we are confident that scanability will be very good despite the recycled board.”

Production case product changeovers are performed quickly and easily. Traditional Medicinals utilizes Weber’s ink and their exclusive WeberJet software. The Windows® based program runs off a central PC and holds all product information in its database. All the operator needs to do is type in the tea’s UPC number, and the software does the rest. As new products are added to the company’s line, the information can be added to the database.

Product Coding
"We were quite pleased with what the ML500 could do, so we decided to go with Weber again for a second, more complex operation," says Kopriva.

Traditional Medicinals began packaging four different varieties of their teas in one sampler box. This required each individually wrapped tea bag—or “eachie,” as the company refers to them—to be identified with the tea’s name, lot code, and expiration date, for quality control purposes.

Each tea machine doses a specific amount of tea-blend into filter paper that is folded and stapled, along with string and a tag. Each tea bag then travels around a large center wheel where it is individually wrapped in a moisture-proof overwrap, which is heat-sealed closed, ensuring product freshness for years.

Prior to the overwrap traveling to the point of being wrapped around the tea bag, the overwrap runs past Weber’s ML128 ink jet coder. Running off the same software as the ML500 case coder, the ML128 prints the tea’s lot number and expiration date at the top edge of the overwrap.

This is no easy task, according to Kopriva. “We needed something that could handle up to 200 impressions a minute in a dusty environment with ink that would dry fast and not soak through the overwrap.”

Plus, because space at the top of the eachie is limited, the application required adjustable fonts that would remain readable even if very small. The ML128 does this, printing two lines of .1875" high text each in one pass at 188-dpi. “The size and clarity of the ML128’s print works out well for us,” Kopriva says.

Traditional Medicinals is so pleased with Weber’s ink jet coders, plans are in the works to add a ML128 unit to each of the company’s six tea bagging machines to code lot numbers and expiration dates on all "eachies", instead of just the bags sold in sampler packs.

All of the ink jet coding equipment is fully supported by Weber’s nationwide sales and service network, which makes all the difference to Traditional Medicinals.

“The service we receive from Weber has been excellent and the cost for the systems was reasonable,” says Kopriva. “They listened to what we wanted, understood our operations, and provided the right equipment.”

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