About Lubna Foods

Located in Bradford, close to Leeds, Lubna Foods Ltd, owner of the Supreme brand, provides a complete service in the bulk distribution of leading branded food products.

The company predominantly supplies food ingredients which cater for clients from small retailers to expansive wholesalers.

Lubna currently operate with highly customised lines and equipment to ensure that products, which include dried fruits, nuts, edible oils, flour, herbs, ground spices and rice, as well as a variety of tinned and bagged lentils, pulses, vegetables and fruits, can be processed in the most efficient way.

The Need

As the demand for ethnic foods can vary based on cultural festivals and activity, Lubna is often required to scale up production output multiple times throughout the year in order to continue to provide the highest quality produce and ensure that all products can be delivered to suppliers on time.

It has always been a necessity for the company to invest in the latest production line equipment and reliable high quality consumables to ensure that as demand grows, the company has future-proof technology in place to continue to satisfy supplier’s growing demand for diverse high volume produce, while remaining competitive within the UK’s ethnic food market.

In the past, the company has found it challenging to print allergen information and complex languages on products. Printing clear allergen information has been an EU / UK legal requirement since 2014 and correct language information is essential when processing produce where English may be the second language of both the supplier and customer.

The Solution

After a successful demo of the CLARiSOFT™ label design software, Lubna were impressed with the software’s ability to easily render a broad range of fonts and languages across their growing range of products. The company were also impressed with the software’s compatibility to work across the full range of ICE products and the sharp prints achieved with ICE ribbon.

“After trialling the label design software used by ICE printers, we quickly saw the potential in the software to cut hours of wasted time by making prints easily readable and production more efficient.

“We were also impressed with how quickly label design files could be updated without stopping the line during production changes.”

The Benefit

It is crucial that Lubna has the ability to meet complex language and labelling requirements and has on-call support from its machinery partners, in order to reduce downtime and continue to satisfy growing order fulfilment targets.

Lubna is now also seeing long term benefits of using Clearmark (ICE) consumables, both for quality and efficiency. Additionally, Lubna benefitted from being one of the first businesses to replace a manual labelling process with the Vulcan Print and Apply labeller, which successfully prints and applies over 2 million box labels every year. “Boxes used to be hand built with labels being manually applied before each box was sealed. This was extremely time consuming and created lots of opportunity for error, we now use the Vulcan and a case erector, which takes all of the stress out of our secondary packaging.”

By switching to Zodiac Thermal Transfer Overprinters, Vulcan Print and Apply Labellers and by using intelligent label design software and high quality Clearmark (ICE) consumables, Lubna now has more time to focus on helping their customers.

“The ability to quickly create and edit label designs that incorporate a range of complex languages in real-time has given us even more time to focus on continuing to improve the quality of our produce and to strengthen relationships with our producers, suppliers and customers.”

The Future

With a growing number of Zodiac and Vulcan printers used throughout the factory, Lubna is looking to expand the business with new baggers, weighers, multiheads and reliable printers.

As the company grows, Lubna is also interested in streamlining their operation with the addition of CLARiNET™ networking software, providing a single data source for all coding machines in a factory, thereby reducing both the risk of coding errors and simplifying the process of data management.

Find out how you could benefit from reliable ICE printers and consumables like Lubna Foods, discover a better coding partner today.