Discover your next big idea at PACK EXPO Las Vegas
Experience a breakthrough in packaging & processing and transform your business with solutions from 2,300 suppliers spanning all industries. Click to learn more.

Preventing Legitimate Products From Entering Illegitimate Channels

Strong relationships with its suppliers, customers helps converter Nosco protect brands.

Seen here are serialized Nosco labels on bottles.
Seen here are serialized Nosco labels on bottles.

Everyone knows that protecting your brand stretches across all areas of a company.

Brand protection includes issues like serialization, anti-counterfeiting and anti-diversion. And, it's not just your company that you have to worry about. It's critical to have a good relationship with your business partners.

Tackling the brand protection worry, and the other issues that come along with them has further strengthened the bond between packaging converter Nosco and its label supplier Avery Dennison.

The two companies have worked together for decades now, estimates Craig Curran, Nosco’s Vice President of Sales & Marketing.

“We’ve been great partners in the pharmaceutical business,” he says. “And, it’s been expanding in recent years into a broader healthcare packaging relationship.”

Kregg Albrecht, Nosco’s Vice President of Solutions Engineering, explains, “Brand protection is a broad area that involves anti-diversion, anti-counterfeiting and anti-tampering. We see serialization as primarily an anti-diversion effort.”

Albrecht describes diversion as legitimate product entering illegitimate channels.

“In this case, the drug may not actually be counterfeit, but it's sold in a market for which it's not intended. So diversion is typically a geographic issue where a product might be selling in a country where it's not authorized.”

Authentication technologies, he says, help address where the drug product or its package “have been outright counterfeited. When I say authenticating technology, these include taggants and other technologies that are difficult or nearly impossibly to duplicate by a counterfeiter, perhaps hidden so that they won't be seen.”

Such covert technologies can work in tandem with overt anti-counterfeiting efforts that are easily seen but ideally difficult to duplicate or mimic.

Working on pharmaceutical security and brand production issues represent “the true partnership between Avery Dennison and Nosco,” says Alison Schuitema, Avery Dennison Product Manager, Pharmaceuticals—Materials Group North America. She says that’s because “many security and brand protection solutions are a combination of features within facestocks and the adhesives, along with print technology and varnishes that go on top. It's a cool partnership, the way we can work together for brand protection. It's always changing.”

Constant change is necessary to keep a step ahead of counterfeiters, says Albrecht.

“It's important to rotate the technologies. It might be as simple as a hidden feature that reflects a certain wavelength or a certain color, and then over time you might change that to a different wavelength or a different color output. If you pre-plan that out in advance, it helps with the selection of technologies.”

Global and material issues

Break out of the ordinary: see what’s new in packaging & processing!
At PACK EXPO Las Vegas, you’ll see machinery in action and new tech from 2,300 suppliers, collaborate with experts and explore transformative solutions. Join us this September to experience a breakthrough in packaging and processing.
REGISTER NOW AND SAVE
Break out of the ordinary: see what’s new in packaging & processing!
Conveying Innovations Report
Editors report on distinguishing characteristics that define each new product and collected video demonstrating the equipment or materials as displayed at the show. This topical report, winnowed from nearly 300 PACK EXPO collective booth visits, represents a categorized, organized account of individual items that were selected based on whether they were deemed to be both new, and truly innovative, based on decades of combined editorial experience in experiencing and evaluating PACK EXPO products.
Take me there
Conveying Innovations Report