Margaret Hall is a family owned and run craft bakery, based in Warwick, which specialises in handmade cakes, tartlets and biscuits for a wide customer base. The firm began in 1963 as a retailer of high quality bread and cakes, and had 14 shops in the Midlands before deciding to concentrate solely on manufacturing after 1998.

With a wide range of artisan confectionery products, supplied either in an ambient or frozen format, Margaret Hall supplies to a wide variety of national customers from their BRC A-grade bakery, and of course clear and attractive labelling is essential.

“We supply over 80 lines,” explained Jonathan Walsh, managing director of Margaret Hall, “using a combination of colour and black and white labels. We had been using a mixture of outsourced labels and labels printed in-house, but we were interested to find out if a specialist label company could offer us any improvements.”

“Axicon Labels has exceeded our expectations, as we thought we were already pretty good at labelling, after doing it for over 50 years. We now realise that baking is our specialist subject, while Axicon’s is labelling and barcoding.”

Adam Carey of Axicon Labels realised that the balance of in-house and outsourced label production could be changed, and that by using digital and flexographic printing options Margaret Hall could be given more flexible options. “By changing how the labels are sourced and over-printed at Margaret Hall, we have freed up a member of staff for additional sales and marketing tasks, and made the process of printing date labels more straightforward. We have also improved the ease of scanning barcodes on some labels, helped meet the latest EU 1169 food information regulations, and are here to help with any unusual requirements”.

Axicon Labels has configured an in-house standalone printer to work from barcoded instructions so that no mistakes can be made when matching the product with the correct label. The labels cannot be altered accidentally so they always conform to both legal and customers’ requirements. Any barcodes required on labels are verified to ensure they comply with international ISO/IEC standards, and never cause a problem in the supply chain.

“The advice on how to re-plan our label production, and use our in-house equipment more efficiently alongside Axicon printed stock has been a major help,” added Jonathan Walsh. “We no longer spend much time thinking about labelling and this gives us even more time to focus on the products we produce.”

“If you are considering a review of the barcoding and labelling within your business, I would highly recommend Adam and the team at Axicon Labels.”