Outer Case Labels in Wakefield: Case, Pallet and Batch Labelling

The label was fine when it left the packing bench. Then the case went through the shrink wrapper, sat on a chilled pallet overnight, got dragged off a forklift tine at a Normanton cross-dock, and by the time a scanner was pointed at it the barcode had a crease straight through the bars and a corner curling off the cardboard. The driver hand-keys it and the pallet goes to the wrong bay. That is the argument for outer case labels Wakefield warehouses can actually scan, and it is why the material matters as much as the artwork.

Outer case labels Wakefield distribution sheds can scan first time

Wakefield sits close to the junction of the M1 and M62, with the A1 to the east, which is why so much warehousing and distribution ended up in the district. Wakefield 41 Industrial Estate is a large, long established industrial and logistics estate, and Card Factory has its head office there. Wakefield Europort, out at Normanton, is a rail freight terminal with distribution estates around it. Haribo has a factory at Castleford. Goods do not sit still round here. They get palletised, wrapped, stored, split and moved again, and every one of those steps is a chance for a badly specified label to lift or go unreadable.

An outer case label has a different job to a pretty label on a retail jar. Nobody is meant to admire it. It has to say what is in the box, who it is for and which batch it came from, and hand that to a scanner in half a second in poor light. We print these custom labels in-house in Hull, in full colour CMYK, on the material that suits where the case is actually going.

What the case has to survive between the packing line and the trailer

Start with the shrink wrapper. A hot tunnel and a tight film do two unkind things to a label. The heat softens a cheap adhesive so the label creeps, and the film pulls at the edges and lifts the corners. A label applied thirty seconds earlier has barely begun to bond, because permanent adhesives need time to key in and corrugated card is a rough, dusty, low energy surface to start with. The fix is part adhesive and part geometry: a stronger initial tack, rounded corners so there is no sharp point for the film or a passing tine to catch, and a label sized to sit well inside the fold in the board.

Then cold. A lot of what leaves this district is food. Wakefield sits inside the Rhubarb Triangle and Yorkshire forced rhubarb has protected status, so in winter there are crates coming out of dark forcing sheds and into chill within hours. Pontefract has its liquorice history and Castleford has confectionery. Chilled goods punish a standard label twice: the case is already cold and slightly damp when the label goes on, and condensation forms on it again every time it comes back out into a warm loading bay. Water gets under the edge, paper wicks it up, ink runs. For a cold store we use a synthetic face with a cold temperature adhesive, so the label sticks at the point of application and stays stuck through freeze and thaw. The same thinking as our waterproof labels for wet handling.

Then abrasion. Cases get pushed, stacked, slid and clamped, and a forklift does not read your artwork. Print on plain uncoated paper and it will scuff, and a scuffed barcode is a dead barcode. A laminate over the face keeps the bars crisp and stops the label acting like blotting paper when a pallet is tipped outdoors at an estate off junction 31 in November.

Finally the barcode. Bars need quiet zones, contrast and width. Shrink one to squeeze in more text, print it over a colour block, or run it across the corrugation so the ridges break the scan, and it will fail somewhere down the chain, on somebody else's site. Send us the barcode as vector artwork at the size you want it read and we will keep it there.

Batch, date and lot panels, and where to leave a gap

Case labels carry two kinds of information. The fixed part never changes: your name, the product, the pack quantity, the product barcode, handling marks. The variable part changes every run: batch or lot number, date of manufacture, best before, sometimes a consignment reference.

We print the fixed part. For the variable part, the sensible answer for most producers is a white panel left blank on the label, with a border and a printed field name such as BATCH, DATE or LOT, which you fill in with a thermal transfer printer, a coder, or a marker pen if volumes are small. That keeps you off the treadmill of reprinting artwork every time a batch number changes. Keep that panel matt and uncoated, or your own ink will smear on a glossy laminate. Tell us how you fill it in and we will spec the surface to suit.

Spec by destination: ambient, wrapped, chilled, tipped outdoors

Sizes are up to you. Pallet identification labels tend to be large and portrait, because the barcode is read from a distance and often from two sides of the pallet. Case labels tend to be smaller and landscape. Send the case dimensions and we will lay the label out so nothing important sits over a fold.

The labels that leave the same building for a different reason

Very few Wakefield firms only need dispatch labels. The district has a growing independent food and drink scene, independent coffee shops and bars, a food, drink and rhubarb festival, and maker markets at The Hepworth Wakefield with independent Yorkshire makers behind the tables. Whoever wants plain scannable labels on the outer case usually wants something better looking on the jar inside it. We print both: retail facing custom stickers and seals for the product, and domed resin labels with a clear polyurethane dome for machinery and long life marking. Wakefield's industrial roots are in mining, textiles and engineering, and the National Coal Mining Museum for England is at Overton in the district, so there is no shortage of engineering firms round here that need the hard wearing sort. Branding the outside of a retail parcel is a different job again, and we have covered branded packaging stickers separately.

Questions we get from Wakefield warehouses

Will the label still be on the case after it goes through the shrink wrapper?

If it is specced right, yes. High tack adhesive, rounded corners, and the label kept clear of the case seam. Send a sample case and tell us what temperature the tunnel runs at.

Our forced rhubarb and chilled produce goes straight into cold store. Will paper labels do?

Not reliably. Sticking a label to a cold, slightly damp surface is the hardest thing you can ask an adhesive to do, and paper wicks up condensation. Use a synthetic face with a cold temperature adhesive.

Can you print our batch, date and lot numbers, or do we do that ourselves?

You do that on the line, in the blank panel we print for you. We supply the fixed artwork and the field names, so your batch number can never be wrong because it came off an old print run.

Can you print the GS1 or ITF barcode for our cases?

We print the barcode you supply as part of your artwork, at full size, solid black with clear quiet zones. We do not generate or allocate barcode numbers, so send them as vector artwork exactly as you want them read.

You are in Hull, not Wakefield. How does that work?

Everything is made in-house in Hull and shipped out to you. You get a free digital proof before anything prints, minimum order quantities are low and on many products there are none at all, and shipping is free on orders over 99 pounds.