Looking for a special ingredient to take your butcher shop or food market to the next level?
A meat scale with a printer might be the perfect side dish to go along with your shop’s selection of the freshest, highest-quality meats and homemade items.
In this blog, we’ll explore what a meat scale with printer is, plus how you can use it to improve your small business’ operations.
Let’s get cooking!
What Is an Integrated Meat Scale With Printer?
A meat scale with a printer is an essential tool for any meat shop or grocery store.
Unlike a standard food scale, an integrated meat scale connects directly with your point of sale (POS) system. This allows you to look up a product, then print an embedded barcode to be scanned at checkout with the correct price.
With an integrated meat scale, you can:
- Quickly weigh and price items accurately, eliminating the need to look up or calculate cost manually at checkout.
- Generate custom barcode labels for any cut of meat, including marinated meats or special cuts.
- Sync new items and updated pricing seamlessly between your scale and your POS system.
The bottom line: When butcher shops and food markets weigh items on a disconnected scale, they have to go through the tedious process of looking up an item price on a table and writing it out by hand.
These traditional pricing methods can lead to long lines, inaccurate pricing, and fed-up customers. These days, integrated scales are cheap and easy to use — so if you’re thinking about upgrading your setup, now’s the time.
6 Reasons To Use an Integrated Meat Scale at Your Food Market
As they say “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Many meat market owners have relied on a trusty scale and markers for years — why change things up now?
Here are six important reasons to invest in an integrated meat scale for your business.
1. Improves Pricing Accuracy
Imagine this: A customer approaches your butcher counter and asks for three of your nicest, thick-cut ribeye steaks. After they’ve received the steaks, they head to the checkout counter.
If your cashier misreads the label, looks at the wrong row on the pricing list, or just types the wrong number accidentally, your bottom line suffers. These mistakes might be uncommon, but they add up over time.
An integrated meat scale solves these problems. Your butcher would simply look up the name or item code while weighing the steak, and the scale would pull the correct per-pound pricing directly from your inventory management system. The butcher would then print a label with the correct item name, weight, and price embedded into a scannable barcode.
Meat markets need to periodically adjust their pricing to maintain healthy profit margins. These labels take the guesswork out of the checkout process and ensure customers are always charged the correct price.
2. Reduces Checkout Wait Times
A meat scale with a printer doesn’t just improve checkout accuracy, it also makes the checkout process significantly faster.
If your cashiers have to manually enter the item type, weight, and price into your POS system each time a customer purchases fresh, custom-cut meat, then your checkout lines are likely longer than necessary.
A meat scale with a built-in printer eliminates this time-consuming process and allows your cashiers to simply scan the product’s barcode, providing your customers with a speedy, simple checkout experience.
3. Enhances Customer Satisfaction
If your butchers prepare freshly packed meat each day to place in freezers on the sales floor, printing custom labels can improve customers’ browsing experience.
They’ll be able to quickly scan each package and immediately determine the cut of meat, lean percentage, weight, and price.
These labels make a huge difference for customers in a hurry. If they’re stopping by on their way home from work to pick up a quick dinner, they won’t have to spend a long time looking around to find exactly what they need.
Clear labels also help build trust with customers ordering from the counter, since they can easily confirm they were given the right cut at the right price.
4. Improves Compliance With Food Safety Regulations
In the grocery industry, compliance with food safety regulations is nonnegotiable. Following these rules protects your customers’ health and your business’ reputation, so it’s crucial to have processes in place to guarantee that you’re only offering the freshest meats.
Combined with a modern inventory management system, printed labels are a handy addition to your food safety toolbox, allowing you to clearly label each of your meats with expiry dates. This makes it easy for staff to quickly find soon-to-expire stock to put on sale or clear out.
5. Eliminates Waste
An often overlooked hurdle to butcher shop and grocery store profitability is waste.
However, you can use your meat scale with printer to prevent spoilage and reduce waste.
For example, if your customers’ requests for on-demand meat behind the butcher counter have decreased, you can implement a strategy to preportion and package this meat, print a helpful barcode label for it, and place it on the sales floor at a slight discount.
This approach prevents you from having to dispose of any inventory and gives your customers the opportunity to try something new.
6. Optimizes Your Stock Levels and Selection
The last way an integrated meat scale can improve your shop’s operation is through inventory management and optimization.
Using barcode labels when a meat product is packaged and purchased ensures that your inventory records are accurate down to the last ounce, showing you which cuts are flying off the shelves and which are sitting in the cooler.
Equipped with these insights, you can tailor your stock to meet your shoppers’ wants and needs, giving your sales and your customer satisfaction a boost.
4 Top Recommendations for Integrated Meat Scales With Printer
By now, you should have a pretty good grasp on why an integrated scale is useful, so let’s get into specifics.
Here are our recommended scale models:
- Brecknell 6700U series: These lightweight options offer accurate weights, but need to attach to a nearby terminal to input product information.
- CAS CL5500: This scale comes with a simple button interface to input product codes and print labels directly from the scale without needing to use the POS terminal.
- CAS CL7200: The CL7200 is a slight upgrade from the 5500 in that it includes a touchscreen interface, making it easier to input popular products.
- Hobart Quantum series: The Hobart Quantum scale has a large screen, several shortcut buttons, and a keyboard for easy item lookup.
When choosing a scale, your first port of call is your POS provider. Not all scales are compatible with all POS systems, and some providers require you to use their proprietary hardware.
Make Running Your Butcher Shop Easy With Markt POS
An integrated meat scale with printer can make a world of difference for your butcher shop. This critical tool keeps your profits high, your customers happy, and your waste minimal.
If you’re looking for the best meat scale with a printer that integrates seamlessly with your POS system, check out Markt POS. Markt POS is an all-in-one POS solution that includes catch weight sales support, robust inventory management, advanced reporting, and sales-boosting features like a built-in customer loyalty program.
With support for a wide range of popular scales, Markt POS makes it easy to track and price weight-based inventory.
Schedule a personalized demo today to see Markt POS’ integrated meat scale in action, or use our Build and Price tool to create a custom solution for your small business.
by Luke
