US-based Spectra (a division of Dimatix), a leading developer and manufacturer of piezoelectric ink jet print heads, components and related consumables, has launched Merlin FG, the world’s first high-speed production system suitable for digital decoration and marking of food products such as biscuits, crackers, potato chips, confectionery and baked goods.

The product will soon be available in the Gulf from Al Thika Packaging, Dubai.
“Merlin FG is a completely unique system used for decorating food with variable printed images and messages at production line speeds,” says Tim Ansell, sales director, Al Thika Packaging. The ink used is all food grade and 100 per cent edible – it is an FDA-approved system.
 “Although there are other cake and biscuit decorating systems around, they all work incredibly slowly, often involve transferring the print onto rice paper and then onto the product, and have to be used off-line. This is an on-line process and it prints directly onto the food.”
Masterfoods Group uses it to personalise M&Ms in the US. It can also be used for promotions for product launches, film releases, new car launches and competitions. It can also print onto ice cream.
Digital decoration allows non-impact, direct, variable imaging and decoration directly on to a product’s surface at full-production speed without any intermediate steps. Pre-stored images, text and logos can be imaged and repeated time and again or varied surface-to-surface,” wrote Per J Frost and Rich J. Baker from Spectra in an article highlighting the new digital decoration system introduced by the company.
“The Merlin FG is a modular system designed to meet specific production requirements for resolution, colour and throughput. The base configuration supports a print width of 71mm for single lane printing and runs up to 152 m per minute, easily accommodating the host production line without hampering its overall effectiveness. The system is designed for four-colour printing, but monochrome configurations are available as well. The system can be expanded to accommodate multiple-lane decoration, wider print widths, or both – greatly enhancing the system’s overall productivity.”
Merlin FG is NEMA 4X rated and utilises Spectra’s world-leading proprietary piezoelectric drop-on-demand ink jet technology. Fully FDA compliant, it dispenses edible and FDA approved colourants in a CMYK printing process. The colourants dry by absorption or evaporation to create durable and robust images on the food products.
“ The system meets the demanding needs of the food industry and performs with extremely high reliability even in the harshest of environments. Images can be created and modified with standard graphic-design software and then imported into Merlin’s system software, which does the colour separation before sending the data to the printing device,” Frost and Baker wrote.
“Although, the Merlin is a self-contained unit with all computer functions built-in it can easily be networked and operated on a remote basis. The controller is very powerful and although the standard configuration supports one CMYK print head cluster, it can be expanded to support up to 32 print head clusters for multi-lane applications. Fully configured, the Merlin FG has astonishing productivity, capable of well over 65,000 biscuits per minute all decorated with different images.”
Many large-scale food companies, in their attempts to create a unique visual appeal of their products use colours and shapes and they rely on dies to stamp a unique decorative pattern onto the products. However, dies are wasteful and inflexible and changing the dies is very time-consuming. This results in costly down time for the production line. By comparison, ink jet decoration allows the users to decorate the products with custom designs while avoiding waste and lengthy setups. More importantly, ink jet technology can be used to cost-effectively decorate any number of items, from a single cookie to millions.
Ink jet is a method that is relatively non-invasive to the current food manufacturing production lines. The print head clusters can be placed over existing sections of a production line without the need for additional line sections. Ink jet can be applied to products at various stages of the production process.