“Display until” or “Best Before” dates on labels have always been a problem if production planning dictates that you should pack several days ahead of the batch being shipped to the distribution depot, as is the case with many fruit and vegetable pack houses.
This usually causes problems as the old programmes were fairly inflexible with lots of manual modifications to the label design being required to adjust the dates shown on the label. This can often lead to mistakes being made and labels left with the modified dates rather than the original date.
When a label sent to the packing machine asks the operator for the “Depot Day”(the day the product will leave to move to the distribution depot), the offset days are now calculated from the depot date. An added safe guard is that the range of dates can be restricted to stop “Display until”, “Best Before” dates a year in advance, for example.
The modification, which can also allow fruit caliber to be chosen at the time of packing is supplied as a “plugin” (a small additional “add on program” to the current version of Girprint). The label delivery screen shows what will be printed so the operator can check the dates before committing to printing.