By utilising an innovative thermal inkjet coding technology, Koorelah Farms prints high-resolution date and batch codes on every carton without fail.

Koorelah Farms is one of Australia’s largest growers of outdoor vine-ripened gourmet tomatoes. Situated in the Whitsundays region, the family farm was established in the 1950’s and is an integral part of North Queensland’s farming community.

The tomato farmers pack up to 500,000 kilograms of produce each week for 24 weeks of the year to supply the East coast of Australia through the winter period, servicing supermarkets, wholesalers and resellers.

The staff at Koorelah work hard to uphold their reputation as a market leader and use innovative technologies to elevate their operations and stay a step ahead of their competitors.

In 2018 Koorelah sought to improve the quality of the batch and date codes applied to their cartons, in response to new traceability standards requested by their distributors. At the time, they were using a legacy large character coding system – the combination of both the older technology and the age of the machine itself resulted in a poor, low-resolution print which meant that one out of ten of the date and batch codes printed on the cartons were illegible. This in turn caused NCR’s (Non-Conformance Rejections) from their distributors, resulting in downtime and significant costs for both parties. 

“If a carton was sent to a state that had a certain protocol around produce acceptance, there would be a major non-conformance issued and we would be suspended from supplying that site until we had audited and were able to prove that we would meet the requirements of that protocol.” —Robert Lee, Koorelah Farms.

Partnering with our sister company Signet’s North Queensland branch, insignia helped to supply Koorelah Farms with the Domino G130i Thermal Inkjet Coder for high-quality coding directly onto their tomato cartons.  

Domino’s G130i Thermal Inkjet Coder is a simple to use, low maintenance solution that delivers high-resolution coding at the highest speed. This means Koorelah Farms did not have to sacrifice efficiency for quality and would be ensured a high-quality, legible print every time. It has a compact, modular, and robust design that allows it to be implemented into almost any production environment and easily adapt to increases in production output.  

Since the implementation of the Domino Thermal Inkjet solution Koorelah Farms has received zero NCR’s and improved the traceability of their pallets by 10%.

“The quality of print we get with the Domino coder means we have improved traceability of our cartons by 100%. The G130i is also very user-friendly which has made it easy for our staff to use and to integrate into our existing process.”

insignia is proud to be the sole Australian distributor for Domino, bringing their range of inkjet, laser, thermal transfer, print and apply labelling, and thermal overprint products to the Australian market, and delivering high-quality traceability solutions to Australian businesses like Koorelah Farms.

For further information

If you would like to learn more about how our thermal inkjet solutions can improve traceability and reliability in your production line, contact our team through the enquiry form below or on Live Chat.