Labels for hand-made African-inspired sauces and condiments
Bim’s Kitchen is a small family business that made their own original recipes for award-winning curries, hot sauces, marinades and condiments. All products are made in small batches and use exotic ingredients native to or commonly used in Africa. How they use Primera’s label printing and applicator solutions to sell their products is described in the following text.
“The LX900e printer undoubtedly helped us to move quickly and cost-effectively to producing labels that attracted new business which has helped us to grow sales both in the UK and abroad.”
Established in north London but now based in Afonwen, Flintshire in north Wales, Bim's Kitchen is the creation of husband and wife team James “Bim” and Nicola Adedeji. They produce a unique range of hand-made African-inspired products and use ingredients that are native to or commonly used in Africa like baobab fruit, cashew nuts, alligator pepper cubeb and hibiscus flowers amongst others, to make easy-to-use sauces and condiments. All are handmade in small batches to their own original recipes. Their products have won a number of prestigious UK Guild of Fine Food Great Taste Awards.
Most of their products are sold through a UK distributor although they do a lot of direct sales to customers at food festivals and fairs, too. The company also have a growing number of establishments who use its products in-house.
“When we first started”, explains James, “we used to print labels on A4 sheets which were then hand-applied to each product. However as demand and production grew and we began wholesaling our products to stores, it became obvious that higher quality labels and more efficient methods of applying them were required.
For James a good label should be eye-catching but simple, informative and easy to read. Therefore he and his wife looked for a solution that offers high and versatile print resolution, flexibility and professional results. Besides that the solutions should be cost-effective and easy to use. That means they wanted the ability to print from common Windows applications instead of just proprietary software.
Both visited a trade show in London where they were able to see a number of competing systems. In June 2011 they bought a LX900e Color Label Printer and an AP360e Label Applicator
“We use the printer to produce labels for our entire range of products and the applicator to apply them to bottles and jars”, reports James. “We print the number of labels required for each production run and these are applied once the products have cooled down sufficiently.” At least four times a week they are producing between 150 – 700 labels each time.
The owner of Bim’s Kitchen are now able to produce more professional looking labels and can reflect label changes immediately, while minimizing the label wastage at the same time.
Asked about the price-quality ratio, James answers: “For what they do, I believe the LX900e and A360e are quite expensive. Especially for small companies who are most likely to benefit from it. However, we took the view that the costs would be outweighed by potentially pre-printed labels, which would then have to be discarded because of product changes or new label designs. So overall, because of how long we have used the system and how many labels we have printed (over 100,000) and redesigned, I do believe in our case, the Primera system has been very cost-effective.”
“With the more professional labels produced on the LX900e, we undoubtedly made our products more attractive to retailers and year-on-year our sales continue to grow,” emphasizes James.
Bim’s Kitchen is really satisfied with the support and service with Primera as well as Primera’s UK representative KTEC Group.
“We highly recommend the system to other small businesses, who want something that produces professional results but offers so much flexibility,” says James.
To summarise it all, James concludes: “The Primera LX900e printer undoubtedly helped us to move quickly and cost-effectively to producing labels that attracted new business, which has helped us to grow sales both in the UK and abroad. The fact that we have been using the system for more than 3 years through a number of label designs speaks volumes.”
