At the beginning of March, Ravenwood held its second online quarterly meeting with its distributor and printer network.
Up until recent years, and pre-covid, we organised an annual conference here in the UK. We would invite our distributors and printer partners from around the world for a day of presentations, followed by an evening of entertainment. A good time was had by all with a few fuzzy heads the morning after! Sadly, due to the pandemic, we had to cancel last year’s gathering and plans for future conferences have now been placed on hold. In the interim, we are now hosting regular online quarterly meetings for keeping our network up to date.
Ravenwood Agenda
- Official Welcome from our Managing Director, Paul Beamish
- Global Sales
- Nobac – New Markets: #notjustformeatandfish
- Competitor Update
- VXR / Vision Update
- VXR Cloud Based Integration System – Guest Speaker
- Marketing Update
- Q&A Session – Submitted by our Distributors and Printers
Our MD, Paul Beamish, opened the meeting with his official welcome, highlighting a very positive first quarter across all areas of the business.
Dave Gooding, our Commercial Director then updated our network on sales. Sales in 2020 proved to be our best year to date with the addition of several new territories. The first quarter of this year has shown that sales across all machinery is continuing to grow. A great start to 2021.
Dave then went on to highlight how our linerless technology has advanced over the years. Linerless is now so extremely flexible and successful that it suits many types of applications and food sectors – ‘not just for meat and fish’. When Ravenwood was founded in 2004, linerless was mostly adopted by meat and fish producers. Since this time, our team has constantly developed the Nobac 5000 range. As a result, we now have many different machine variants that can apply labels to a variety of pack formats. The latest variant being the 5000L – our Fruit Lid applicator. In addition to meat and fish, linerless is now adopted by the following sectors:
- Vegetarian and plant based
- Fresh fruit
- Fresh and cooked vegetables
- Dairy and baked
- Desserts
- Tubs and salad pots
We then moved on to new label concepts and we discussed the new Fruit Lid at length. The Fruit Lid was launched in the autumn of 2020 and was trialled by Iceland Foods across its range of Conference pears. The trial proved to be a success and the frozen food giant now has plans to roll out this label to additional own brand fruits and vegetables. Other projects in the pipeline include a new label design for yoghurt pots – similar to the Fruit Lid.
Next on the Agenda was our Competitor Update. We discussed and analysed how our Nobac 5000 range compares to our competitor’s sleevers. We consider our machinery to be leading the way overall. Our range is multifunctional, flexible, cost effective, energy efficient and our system produces faultless linerless labels. We also build bespoke.
James Read, our VXR Product Manager, provided an update on the VXR and Vision pack inspection system. The VXR is steadily gaining kudos and we now have systems in place across the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Following on from James, we welcomed a guest speaker who showcased plans for implementing a cloud based solution for operating and monitoring the VXR remotely.
Marketing formed the final topic on our Agenda, presented by Natalie Bell, our Marketing Manager. Natalie showcased plans for building a secondary website for assisting and supporting our distributor, printer and customer network. The site will prove to be an invaluable resource for marketing materials, sales documentation and much more. A customer training zone will also prove extremely beneficial. Customers will be able to gain access to online tutorials, videos and documentation for remote training whilst we live under Covid – and beyond.
A Q&A session then got underway with questions submitted by our distributors and printers, covering many interesting topics.
Ravenwood will hold its next quarterly online meeting in June.
