Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/550307
tobaccoasia 43 STORY TELL YOUR BR AND WITH BOEGLI-GR AVURES Boegli-Gravures can help you to develop subtle, refined and ingenious ways of elevating your brand's characteristics and enhance your consumer brand experience. Let us partner with you to bring new dimensions to your marketing. www.boegli.ch Patents pending. code, date, month, and year are printed onto ciga- rette packs, as well as the name and address of the manufacturer. These new regulations have led to an increased demand for coding equipment. Historically, the purchase of coding equipment was connected to a local market requirement, such as printing the re- tail price or a batch code. However, coding equip- ment is increasingly being used as a critical part of the system used to combat the illicit trade in tobacco products. According to the WHO FCTC Expert Report, the need for aggregation in ciga- rette packaging coding is fundamental. The abil- ity to exchange and manage data gleaned from the coding is vital. Critical to the process of aggrega- tion is the Serialized Unique Product Identifier (SUPI) – a unique number assigned to each and every cigarette pack, carton, bundle, master case, or even pallet. Without each packaging item hav- ing an SUPI code, aggregation is impossible. How does aggregated coding help? "The key here is that at every stage we've created a relation- ship between all of those numbers and all of those packaging formats," explains James Cutforth, global sector manager at Domino Printing Sci- ences UK. "So, from my pallet to my cases to my cartons down to my pack, I can take a number from any point in this relationship and it will all relate either up or down. If I find any pack, I could in theory take my unique number and it would call up which carton, which case, which pallet, and of course, which wholesaler or distributor purchased the product in the first instance. And if the prod- uct has been diverted from, say, a low tax country or state, we have the data we need to challenge a wholesaler or distributor." "When we take all of these into a factory envi- ronment, we face a big challenge of not only being able to print or code these onto products, but we must also capture what is being coded." Domino Printing Sciences was founded in 1978 and is regarded as one of the founders of continuous jet printing, as well as a market leader for cigarette pack identification globally. Over the years, their product portfolio has grown to include manufacturing and supplying ink jet, lasers, ther- mal ink jet, and labeling systems. Most coding on cigarette packaging is still al- phanumeric, but some have Machine Readable Codes (MRC) on them. MRCs are the only way manufacturers can effectively capture what is be- ing coded and printed onto cigarette packs. "If we try to read out alphanumeric characters at production line speed, the challenges would be greatly increased and the chances of bad or no read from the camera system would increase dra- matically," said Cutforth. "Of course, we can't use just any MRC. We have to use the ones that don't