Smart Printers Give RH Foster A Fresh Approach To Food Labeling

Not all the sandwiches RH Foster makes and sells at its chain of Exxon-Mobile convenience stores in Maine are triple deckers, but labeling them for sale was always a laborious three-step process. Once sandwiches were made and wrapped, the store clerk would apply a preprinted label that identified the sandwiches and its ingredients. The clerk would then grab a labeling gun to set and produce the price label. Finally, the clerk would take a separate labeling gun and set the date to make a “use by” freshness label. That’s three separate steps, and the final product wasn’t even bar coded, resulting in an extra manual step to ring up the sandwich at the point of sale.

The process also created support requirements at headquarters, where the sandwich and other food product labels were printed. The foodservice manager would personally print all the labels and either ship or deliver them to retail locations, and was responsible for ensuring each store had enough of the dozens of different product labels that were used. Stores would sometimes run out of preprinted labels and would have to create handwritten ones until a new supply arrived, or end up throwing away labels when ingredients changed or sandwiches were discontinued.

RH Foster wanted to find a smarter way to label its Freshies®- brand products, which are made fresh in each of the company’s 12 retail locations each day. What it found was a smart labeling process that takes advantage of intelligence embedded in an in-store label printer to take time, steps, guesswork and errors out of preparing product labels. RH Foster credits the system for saving at least 130 labor hours per store, per year.