Welcome to our recently launched blog. I was asked to write the first entry to introduce the company, our mission and why I decided to start the company towards the end of 2017.
I have been involved with the coding and marking industry for well over fifteen years now - with less than a two year gap outside of the industry. This industry was my first job out of college and I have to say I have been hooked since day one. I started as a Territory Manager for the West Coast at the world’s leading manufacturer of industrial inkjet inks, fluids, supplies, parts and service. I spent over thirteen years at the company concluding my tenure as President and CEO.
It was during that time that I gained all my coding and marking knowledge and experience. I worked with leading consumer packaged goods companies like McCormick’s, Pepsi and Nestle among others. I also led the way for us to enter the world of equipment sales by expanding our product offering to include continuous inkjet and high resolution print systems.
I began working with thermal inkjet and the ANSER brand of printers in 2006 - and, to be frank, I have been in love with this technology since day one. The technology is maintenance and headache free which is a drastic change from the traditional technologies used for coding and marking over the past several decades (continuous inkjet, valve jet drop-on-demand, Xaar, Trident and hot wax based systems). The printers are centered around Hewlett-Packard ink cartridges that have been proven reliable in the home and commercial office space for decades. These same ink cartridges are now being used for industrial coding and marking printing applications - and, ANSER was one of the first companies to obtain an official Hewlett-Packard OEM license in the early 2000s.
For the first ten years, the technology was limited to secondary packaging applications such as box coding or product identification for master cases due to ink limitations. That changed in 2017 when Hewlett-Packard ink OEMs were finally able to develop a solvent based, fast dry ink that is compatible with thermal inkjet cartridges. We are now able to expand our use of the technology to previously uncharted territories in the world of primary packaging - print positions typically dominated by continuous inkjet, laser, or thermal transfer printing technologies.
Although we still supply and support traditional technologies for coding and marking, thermal inkjet is now our preferred coding technologies. We believe it is now suitable for a vast majority of primary coding applications and we see this evidenced by our expanding customer base that are happily replacing their outdated continuous inkjet printers. Thermal inkjet is how we stay true to our mission: Keep Coding Simple.
Stay tuned to our blog to learn more about the industry, customer success stories and new technologies.