中文Markem-Imaje’s coding and marking equipment has now supported Italian snack manufacturer Amica Chips for more than two decades, a partnership that has quietly become a case study in how reliable coding infrastructure underpins automated, recall-free production. Over a hundred Markem-Imaje printers are installed across Amica Chips’ lines, all managed through the CoLOS software platform that orchestrates the marking process.
Amica Chips was founded in 1990 with a focus on the sense of togetherness its products evoke among consumers. Oscar Moratti, general manager, says the company has always invested in innovation and today runs a fully automated warehouse holding more than 10,000 pallet spaces. That level of automation depends on coding and marking that is both accurate and unattended, because in a high-throughput snack line, a misprinted date or batch code is not a cosmetic nuisance but a potential compliance and safety event.
Paolo Rizzardi, production manager at Amica Chips, frames the payoff plainly: “Today we have no recalls, we have no rework due to human error.” The marking process, run through CoLOS, is described as fully automated, removing the manual intervention that historically introduced mistakes. In food production, where traceability is a regulatory and reputational imperative, that claim carries real weight.
The relationship has evolved technologically across its twenty years. The equipment has progressed from Markem-Imaje’s early thermal transfer overprinters and print-and-apply units to its current CoLOS platform, large-character inkjet printers such as the 5800 Series with Touch Dry technology, and its latest thermal transfer and continuous inkjet models. Each generation was adopted as Amica Chips expanded and faced new markets and new challenges, rather than as a one-time overhaul.
Massimiliano Scomparin, account manager at Markem-Imaje, attributes the partnership’s continuity to “trust, constant presence and mutual growth,” arguing that the work is about understanding a customer’s evolving needs rather than merely installing hardware. Guido Torriglia, sales director at Markem-Imaje Italy, says the goal is to help customers protect their brand, optimize processes, support sustainability objectives and generate long-term value.
For Amica Chips, the rationale for staying with a single coding provider is operational as much as relational. Standardizing on one platform and one software layer simplifies training, maintenance and integration with warehouse and enterprise systems. With more than a hundred printers in the field, consistency of consumables, support and data flow becomes a strategic asset.
The story also reflects a broader shift in coding and marking, a discipline once treated as an afterthought at the end of the line. As food safety regulation tightens and brand owners demand end-to-end traceability, coding has moved to the center of production strategy. Suppliers that can deliver connected, software-driven, low-error marking, as Markem-Imaje does through CoLOS, are positioning themselves as infrastructure partners rather than equipment vendors.
With several projects still in the planning stage, the two companies appear set to extend a relationship already measured in decades. For an industry that frequently changes suppliers on price alone, a twenty-year, hundred-printer partnership is a quiet rebuttal: in coding, reliability compounds.
Source: The Packman (thepackman.in), “Markem-Imaje marks two decades of coding Amica Chips’ packaging lines,” 17 September 2026.
There is a quiet lesson here about total cost of ownership. A hundred-printer install standardized on one platform may look like dependency, but for the operator it means one training curriculum, one consumable supply chain and one data layer. In an era when labour is scarce and traceability is mandated, that operational simplicity is worth more than any single hardware discount, and it helps explain why two decades of relationship have outlasted several technology cycles.
There is a broader lesson here about mission-critical, unglamorous technology. Coding and marking rarely feature in the headline stories about printing’s future, yet few functions are as central to a food producer’s legal and commercial survival. A single misapplied date code can trigger a recall that damages a brand far more than a cosmetic print defect ever could. By making the marking process invisible, automated and error-free, suppliers like Markem-Imaje remove a class of risk that operators once managed manually and anxiously. The CoLOS software layer deserves particular credit, because it is what turns a scattered fleet of printers into a single, governed system with consistent data. As food safety regulation tightens worldwide and traceability becomes a board-level concern, the coding supplier’s role shifts from equipment vendor to compliance partner. Amica Chips’ two-decade, hundred-printer relationship is a quiet testament to the value of that shift, and a model other producers are likely to study.
For suppliers, the Amica Chips story is also a retention lesson: the account was kept not by contract but by consistent performance, responsive support and a willingness to evolve the solution as the customer grew. In a market where coding equipment is increasingly commoditised on spec sheets, the differentiator is the relationship and the software that binds the hardware into a manageable system. Markem-Imaje’s emphasis on CoLOS and on understanding Amica Chips’ changing needs over decades is the quiet engine of a partnership that has outlasted several technology cycles and multiple market shifts, and it is the model most equipment vendors would privately like to replicate.
