A Successful Family Business

Posted on: 21 December 2016

If you sell coffee, dry foods such as cereal or nuts, snack foods or similar items, you may want to consider investing in dosing tools. This type of packaging machinery offers a number of benefits, but in particular, it can help save you money in a number of ways. Here's a look at just a few of the ways you may save:

1. Lower wholesale costs

If you are currently buying items that have been packaged elsewhere, you may want to consider altering your approach and doing your own packaging. This allows you to potentially reduce your wholesale costs by buying items in bulk without packaging around them. It also allows you to label these products with your own logo, and that can be a useful branding tool.

2. Accurate package sizes

Depending on the dosing system you buy, you can set up the unit to dispense items by weight, volume or piece count. This allows you to create extremely accurate packages. That prevents you from giving away extra product and inadvertently increasing your costs without a commensurate increase to revenue.

Accurate dosing also helps to ensure that you don't short any packages. This is critical for maintaining your reputation among customers, and it helps to reduce returns or requests for refunds from dissatisfied buyers. Additionally, if you need to change the dosage amount, many machines handle this request easily. Depending on their design, they may have multiple heads, replaceable cups or other features that make changing measurements easy without risking losing accuracy.

3. Integration with other packaging machinery

In some cases, you can buy dosing machinery on its own. However, if you have existing packaging equipment, you may be able to integrate your dosing equipment with those machines. That can ultimately save you money by streamlining processes. For example, imagine you have a vertical bagger.

This machine uses a sleeve of plastic which it fills with items and before sealing both sides of the sleeve. This creates a bag without the cost associated to buying individual bags, and it's a very convenient process. However, when you add dosing components to your vertical bagging machine, you improve the process by making it more accurate and more automated.

4. Reduced labor costs

If you are currently paying your staff to package small items, this can drive up your payroll costs. This is especially true in cases where staff have to painstakingly weigh or measure every item. With dosing equipment and packaging machinery, you can automate most of this process.

If you are trying to figure out whether or not the machinery is worth the upfront investment based on labor costs alone, figure out how many hours per week your staff spends packing. Add up the cost of wages over the course of a year. Then, use this figure to estimate how long it would take the dosing equipment to pay for itself. For example, if you currently spend $10,000 per year on payroll for packaging and the machinery costs only $5,000, it pays for itself within 6 months, and after that, you get to enjoy pure savings.

5. Increased volume

In addition to replacing your workers, dosing equipment can also speed up the packaging process. In most cases, machines can weigh or count items faster than people can, and some machines even come with a multi lane setup. Multiple lanes makes these machines capable of dosing and packing more than one item at a time. That can increase your volume capabilities and ultimately make it possible for you to make more sales.

If you want to learn more about the cost effectiveness of dosing equipment or any other packaging solutions, contact a packaging machinery company today.