MAN Roland and PrintCity Provide Answers from the Packaging Perspective - Keep it Real: Print and Counterfeit Products

Counterfeit products are big business, and, as emphasised by the recent scare in the UK regarding Lipitor, an anti-cholesterol drug used by millions of Britons to treat heart disease, it is also a potentially fatal one.

Lipitor was prescribed by British doctors 11 million times during the last year, and whilst a total of just 120,000 packs of the product are being recalled by the health watchdog, reports suggest that deaths worldwide from fake medicines are well in excess of 100,000 per annum.

This issue, of course, is not confined to the pharmaceutical industry. The World Health Organisation’s Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition estimates that as much as 8% of all international trade involves counterfeit goods. Of even more concern to brand owners is WHO’s estimate of a 10 to 15% per year growth rate in the production of fakes.

Given such worrying statistics, it will come as no surprise that much consideration is being given to this issue by major agencies and organizations throughout the world. In the US, for example, the Food and Drug Administration is already part way through a programme to adopt some form of track and trace technology for the drugs industry, through the use of RFID technology. It aims to have this in place by 2007. The FDA report also includes a project to evaluate a whole range of authentication technologies.

What Can Print Do?
Print, of course, should expect to play an integral part in the creation of packaging materials that provide as many cost-effective anti-counterfeit measures as are feasible.

Press manufacturer MAN Roland has already made significant strides in this direction, and, through association with its PrintCity partners, many more breakthroughs are expected to be released during the coming months and

The company recently released information regarding its development work towards partial production of RFID systems on a printing press. As an initial approach, it is being investigated whether the antennae needed for the transponder could be printed directly on the substrate and the chips then applied. Using offset or other printing processes, suitably conductible inks or pastes based on metal or conductible polymers could be printed. At drupa 2004 MAN Roland showed RFID applications in practice using antennae printed with metal-based inks. It is also conceivable that foil transfer printing could be a viable process, and again MAN Roland is examining the potential for this with its own InlineFoiling product.

Indeed, it should be noted that the company has been leading the way in the press world with regarding to bringing other processes “in-line”. Recent applications that have been brought into the press configuration include foiling, embossing, and, most recently in-line marking with its experimental InlineCopyMark product.

InlineCopyMark, or in-line inkjet to be more precise, is a system currently under investigation by the German supplier, and is a product that MAN Roland would certainly be keen to integrate into the right system immediately, depending upon the requirements of the customer.

These in-line processes are enhanced by other capabilities provided on-press, including the combination of inspection and sorting of imperfect sheets with the MAN Roland EagleEye and InlineSorter, and MAN Roland’s highly respected coating, varnishing and drying capabilities – coatings that can be added to the sheet either before or after the main printed elements. Additionally, the use of UV based inks and coatings provide even more potential for producing secure or difficult to reproduce packaging products.

In Parnership
These exciting on-press capabilities have also been incorporated with other security- focused products from MAN Roland’s PrintCity partners. The PrintCity organisation has integrated a significant number of products from its partners in two highly detailed and thought provoking sample packages. Whilst these samples imitate packages from the cosmetics industry, the security features included could be easily applied to similar cartons and packaging materials used with pharmaceutical, music, video, or telecommunications products.

Systems using such elements as micro-text, thermochromatic inks, security pigments, optically variable images, and fluorescent inks all go to make the samples produced virtually impossible to copy without incurring significant costs. Even the cartonboard itself incorporates unique security features.

[Note to editors: a detailed examination of the enclosed “Security Packaging” folder will provide you with details on the various security systems employed on the packaging samples included.]

For information on MAN Roland’s full range of sheetfed presses and added security systems, contact MAN Roland Great Britain on the www.man-roland-gb.com web site, or call 020 8648 7090.