This smart packaging model involves digitally printing unique watermarks on each pack, creating for each a digital twin to follow through the supply chain, gathering data on the way. Consumers can interact, too, feeding more data back to the brand.
Bag-in-box wine pack formats that have been digitally printed with watermarks that are readable by consumer smartphones were a big splash item at the Sealed Air booth at PACK EXPO.
At first glance, Prismiq seems like highly conceptual stuff, and it is. That’s because it’s not a single product offering, like a machine or software. Rather, it’s a set of capabilities, products, and options that can be intelligently strung together to achieve a range of outcomes that really depends on the brand’s or CPG’s preference.
From the widest possible angle, Prismiq creates a digital twin for each individual unit that a brand or CPG is producing within a chosen SKU or group of SKUs. That happens thanks to a unique watermark (visible or invisible) that is digitally printed onto the packaging of each and every product unit. The watermark can be read and reacted to in different ways by scanners, sensors, and smartphones as it travels through the supply chain. And upon each interaction with a sensor or smartphone, data is added to the digital twin to better describe that individual product’s unique journey.
According to the company, Prismiq could impact CPGs at two levels. The more obvious use is in the realm of consumer-facing, experiential smart packaging. A brand can delight its end consumers by providing product provenance information, product-specific nutritional information, or hyper-personalization. That content is made available on a website or app that the consumer can access by scanning a digitally printed watermark on the pack with a smartphone.
But perhaps more foundationally, Prismiq could have big impacts upstream, at the processing, packaging, and supply chain logistics levels. That’s because of the many efficiencies that a company can realize by managing both the digitally printed/watermarked products traveling through the supply chain—gathering and storing data associated with each product as it’s packaged, palletized, and transported—and each product’s digital twin that exists in the cloud, but is uniquely linked to that single product. All the efficiency-borne savings and insights gained by CPGs upstream can end up paying for the enhanced consumer experience with a product downstream.
At PACK EXPO, PW editors spoke with Nathan Henson, the global director for smart packaging and design solutions at Prismiq, to try to wrap our minds around all of this. It’s a prime PACK EXPO example of active, intelligent packaging.
“Our Prismiq brand is a holistic approach to how we look at digital. It’s our graphic services, it’s our digital printing, and it’s our smart packaging,” he says. “We have two things here. First is our digital printing, which is an inline packaging solution that prints variable data onto products [primary or secondary packaging] in full color graphics [in what could be called a digital watermark, potentially invisible to a consumer]. That allows the [CPG] customer to print variable data, inline and in real time, about each product, onto each product. That data [can serve as the basis for] all the content that the end-consumer is looking to have, whether it’s personalized [or contains pertinent product provenance facts].
“Then second, if we go into the [CPG or brand] customer’s production facilities, that’s where we have both a vision solution along with a coding solution. Inside a customer’s four walls, we have a digitally printed bag that has a code embedded—there’s a watermark in it. So as this product is going down the production line, [vision and sensors] capture product-specific information about each product, and we store the data. We’ve taken the physical product, created its digital twin, and we’ve put it in the cloud. And once that product is in the cloud, we can do a bunch with that information,” he continues. “We can support internal operational efficiency things such as rework or recalls. There’s just a ton of use cases there. But what’s cool about this is once we have that digital twin, we can then track that package through supply chain as well. So that’s track and trace, authentication, fraud prevention, those kinds of use cases, which then translate all the way over to, again, that consumer-facing side.”
To ground all these possibilities in a real product, consider boxed wine. Notably, only a week after the show on Nov. 1, Sealed Air’s Cryovac brand announced the acquisition of bag-in-box format packaging supplier Liquibox. According to a Nov. 1 press release from Sealed Air, “E-commerce ready solutions for fluids & liquids will benefit from SEE’s integrated approach to digital and the advancement of Prismiq digital packaging and printing solutions.”
It so happened that at its PACK EXPO booth, Sealed Air was demonstrating bag-in-box form/fill/seal equipment alongside a wall of model bag-in-box wines, all having been digitally printed with an on-pack digital watermark, as a use case for Prismiq.
As Sealed Air’s Jaime Hansen described, imagine information about the provenance of the grapes used for a specific bag-in-box wine, or a specific vintage of wine (for instance, a particularly dry year or a particularly short summer) being associated with a digital twin of each bag-in-box format as it comes off the packaging line. All that data can be captured at packaging and embedded in a digital watermark that’s been digitally printed on-pack and becomes accessible to a consumer via smartphone on as beautiful an interface as a CPG chooses to invest in. Beyond that, consider consumers interacting with the digitally watermarked box of wine, again via a smartphone interface, that presents them with a countdown clock for shelf-life in the fridge once the package is opened.
“Another piece is that [thanks to the digital twin] we’re then connecting the processor or brand with the interaction at the consumer level,” Hansen says. “It can produce powerful insights for the processors. Think about that consumer countdown clock. If they have a consumer who uses it, the interaction goes to the cloud and is associated with the digital twin, and they know when that clock starts ticking. They can then piece together just how long that box of wine has taken to get through distribution to be consumed. They could understand when that specific box was purchased, versus a SKU of it. Remember, alcohol often goes through a distributor, so producers really lose a lot of that valuable information once the box of wine goes out the door. And there could also be benefits for that distributor, too, through this process. It allows those brand owners to get other insights, too. In the case of recalls, if a consumer interacted with a recalled box, the brand can learn exactly when the recalled box was opened, and when that specific box was bottled.”
Meanwhile, all of the other process-oriented data that’s not for consumer consumption and won’t appear in the consumer interface—say shelf life of an unopened box of wine as it travels through the supply chain and sits on a retailer’s shelf—also can be associated with the digital twin that’s been created for each box. Could a retailer benefit from knowing a box of wine was approaching an expiration date, revealing that maybe some discounting should happen to move that wine soon? Sure. And even further upstream, consider a winery having to navigate realities like recalls or line inefficiencies, all made more efficient by managing through a digital twin with specific data associated with each product. And all these upstream, B2B efficiency benefits ultimately pay for the consumer experience piece, interaction piece, and consumer insights piece mentioned above. PW
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