drupa Essentials of Print: Anja Röhrle
With our series drupa Essentials of Print, we provide printing professionals with a platform to share their views on industry-related topics.
Brand Protection: Secure QR Codes and Watermarks Provide Security
Digital printing technology also has a lot to offer in terms of brand-protection: secure QR codes are not replicable and provide a reliable method of verifying whether a product is genuine or counterfeit. It makes sense to combine this with a tamper-evident closure on the corrugated cardboard transport packaging. Printed, serialised codes allow packaging to be tracked, but also verified. In addition, this can be used to “marry” product and packaging with each other, for example to record individual batch numbers, production data and production times. This also makes traceability much easier to implement in the event of a recall. Watermarks can also be printed on the transportpackaging in digital pre-print, which enables hidden coding in the printed image. When used selectively, this can in turn be used to check whether it is an original product or not.
If you want to know what other exciting news the packaging industry has to offer, you should definitely read the entire drupa Essentials of Print article here.
About the Author:
Anja Roehrle, Marketing & Communication Manager at DS Smith
“Digital pre-print opens a new era for brand protection and brand activation in e-commerce. Smart, digitally printed corrugated cardboard packaging solutions inform, entertain and network the shopper. They warn of product counterfeiting and guarantee transparency in shipment and traceability. All this is now possible not only for short, but also for medium and long print runs. Hence, there is almost a paradox: that of individualised mass production.”
Header picture © Messe Düsseldorf/ctillmann
