Bel Brands, the US subsidiary of the French cheese company Fromageries Bel, is located some 20 miles southwest of Green Bay, WI, in Little Chute. Bel Brands manufactures a variety of popular cheeses in Wisconsin, from the Connoisseur brand to Kaukauna cheese balls, logs, cups and tubs, to the Wisconsin Pride line of cheeses and spreads and the Merkts and Owls Nest brands.

Chuck Kiley, purchasing manager for Bel Brands USA, says the company will go through some 450 different labels in a year, with new flavors being added and ingredient changes affecting certain stocks. The Wisconsin facility produces all of the brands mentioned above, while its Leitchfield, KY, USA plant produces the Laughing Cow brands: Mini Baby Bel, Laughing Cow wedges, Light Gourmet Cheese Bites, and the Gourmet Cheese and baguette line.

While the cheeses produced in the Wisconsin facility are similar, Kiley says that the Wisconsin Pride brands, which Bel Brands added in 1996, sell better on the East Coast, while the Kaukauna brand is more popular in the Midwest and on the West Coast.

The cheese business is quite seasonal, according to Kiley, the peak being July through November. Because many of the spreads and cheeses utilize seasonal ingredients such as cranberries and wild blueberries, Kiley says, “We have to have fast turnaround from our label supplier.” Belmark Labels is just 20 miles away in De Pere, but even more important, he says, is that “they’re just a mouse click away. I can order on the web, make changes and pull up a picture of any of our labels in an instant to ensure I’m ordering or changing the right one.” [Editor’s Note: Belmark has won TLMI’s Best Managed Company Award an unprecedented eight times.]

Kiley has high praise for Belmark as a supplier. “I might get a call in the morning from manufacturing, saying ‘We know these labels are here somewhere and we’re ready to start labeling this afternoon but we can’t find them.’ I can call Belmark that morning and they’ll deliver the labels that afternoon!”

Kiley adds that “Bel Brands tries to do anything we can to satisfy our customers, and this can make it very demanding for our label supplier.” Many new cheese flavors, he says, are the result of input from customers.

About 95 percent of the labels are automatically affixed; the cheese balls are labeled from the bottom and the tubs and cups rolled on from the top. According to Kiley, the cheese balls are primarily produced seasonally, but they do manufacture some of them all year round. Production runs (and orders for labels) are based on sales projections which are fed into the computer. This is done about once a month except for the peak times, when managers will review and input data twice a month.

Whenever possible, Kiley says, he’ll work with the Kentucky facility to maximize production, but they too are subject to seasonal and other factors which can affect production. For example, the Laughing Cow wedges saw a 250 percent jump in production several years ago, thanks to a favorable mention in the South Beach Diet Cookbook.

Coffee labels

The john conti Coffee Company, of Louisville, KY, has been in business 44 years. It began with John Conti delivering cigarettes to two vending machines out of his 1949 Chevrolet, and led to the desire to be the best vending operation in town. Soon it was providing hot and cold beverages. In 1971 the company installed its first coffee unit on location. Since 1982 it has been roasting and grinding specialized arabica coffees and will roast over 1.5 million pounds of coffee this year.

Larry Hollingsworth is president of the john conti Coffee Company, but when it comes to interviews he defers to Mark Nethery, COO and master roaster, saying that Nethery knows more details about the business than anyone else around here. Nethery is also responsible for manufacturing and purchasing.

Nethery is proud of the john conti labels, which are extremely high quality with full color graphics. He says that the company currently uses two label suppliers, Louisville Label Inc. (which started as the Louisville Label Works a mere 100 years ago) and Belmark, which provides digital print production and flexible packaging.

“Louisville Label runs our packaging ID/thermal labels, our nameplates and labels for our equipment as well as other pressure sensitive labels,” Nethery says. “Belmark does our flexible packaging and does ‘web to print’ for us, allowing us to economically purchase high quality labels in relatively small quantities,” he adds. “And since we do a lot of private label business, including custom labels for fund-raising efforts, this is a great way to start out relatively small but be ready to grow at a moment’s notice.”

Longer production runs, according to Nethery, are 4,000 to 5,000 on a given run and utilize inline packaging. There are also poly labels with a film overlaminate used on equipment such as iced tea and coffee dispensers. Every unit has an asset tag, and if they change out equipment at a location they will upgrade and renovate that and then relabel. There are approximately 30,000 units in the field.

The coffee bags themselves are preprinted for high quantity runs, including customization for some retailers. The standard lineup of coffees features some 30-plus different labels, from European water process decafs in different roasts to 11 flavored coffees, plus light, medium and dark roasts. “We bar code each carton shipment with the date of manufacture, product description and UPC bar code. Although we call this sealing tape it’s really an 18″ long pressure sensitive label,” Nethery says.

The john conti Coffee Company has a long list of awards it has won for its coffees; it’s a two-time winner of the Tops Award from the Specialty Coffee Association of America, which goes to only a handful of coffee companies throughout the world. In addition to coffee, the company also sells a variety of related products, from water to a large selection of paper and plastic products, soft drinks and tea, cocoa, etc., as well as a variety of sugars, syrups and sweeteners.

More coffee

Boston Stoker is a southwestern Ohio specialty coffee roaster with nine coffee bars/shops. Started in 1973 by Don and Sally Dean, the first store was primarily a pipe and tobacco shop specializing in meerschaum pipes. Today Don is the master coffee taster and roaster and attributes a lot of the success that Boston Stoker has achieved to the fact that “I don’t have to answer to a board and I can buy the kinds of beans my 25 years of experience has taught me that my customers will love.”

In order to keep customers in the first pipe shop, Don started giving away coffee. In the late 1970s he began selling it by the pound. “We would ask customers (all male at the time) if they’d like to buy some, and they would say ‘Let me bring my wife in on Saturday’. Each time the wife would approve the purchase of the coffee.”

In the early ’80s they bought their first roaster, which handled five pounds at a time. Don’s son Henry Dean, a vice president in the company, says that the coffee operation surpassed the pipe and tobacco sales in the mid-’80s, and that by the 1990s cigars had overtaken the pipes. Then they moved up to a 10-pound roaster, and now they’re using a 70-kilo roaster, which takes 15 to 20 minutes to roast nearly 50 pounds of beans. Adjacent to the current roaster is a 150-pound giant, which is in the process of being brought into operation.

Henry says that their Highlander Grogg flavored coffee outsells all the other flavored coffees put together (there are 13 regular flavors and 13 Swiss water process decafs). “Customers tell us it has a very creamy taste, with hints of caramel, scotch whiskey and vanilla,” according to Henry.

With a total of nearly 60 different flavors, blends and roasts, it is not surprising to learn that Boston Stoker carries special coffees such as Jamaica Blue Mountain and Kona Fancy Estate. One of their better sellers is La Minita Terrazu in both light and dark roast, a Costa Rica coffee which has been a favorite of customers for years. Other highly rated coffees are their Red Eye Kenya, Tasse de Oro (cup of gold) Sumatra, and Old Government Java, a coffee bean that had been held in warehouses for seven years and prior to roasting has developed a huge body and hints of sweetness and age. (Yes, talking about coffee flavors is similar to wine!)

“We now have nine Boston Stoker locations serving our coffees and making specialty drinks – one is near the University of Dayton campus, which offers free WiFi service and is open late to accommodate students who are studying. We even have two at the Dayton International Airport, one of which is the only food/drink concession outside the security checkpoint. It’s available to patrons who are there to meet a plane or drop off someone.”

“Samplers of coffees are good sellers,” Henry says, “and we know that people like colorful pictures, so we got started in late August on a holiday sampler program.” The packaging features scenes from the areas the coffees are grown, like Kenya Redeye (a Boston Stoker favorite for the early morning riser), and plaid and landscape from Scotland for Highlander Grogg.

This packaging has grown to three selections, with four different half-pound packages in each attractive tin, in regular coffee, decaf and flavored. Right now, Henry is printing the four-color labels in-house using an HP VP2020 printer.

Regular coffee bags were once all labeled by hand with the distinctive Boston Stoker logo. Now all of the high volume bags are preprinted, according to Henry, but “We still label some of our premium or upscale coffees by hand, including the Kona Estate and Jamaican Blue Mountain. We expect to begin labeling our premium brands with high quality color labels later in 2007. All of our current preprinted labels are supplied by VisionMark Inc., of Sidney, OH, and our labels for the HP printer come from Met-Speed Labels in Nutley, NJ.”

Larry Arway recently retired from Standard Register, where he worked for 35 years in a variety of positions, among them sales promotion manager, product manager, label marketing manager, and technical consultant. Over the years he was involved in the design and development of new products, and has worked closely with many of the major consumer and industrial products companies in North America. A resident of Dayton, OH, USA, Arway can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].