Clariant is the latest company to team up with SICPA, the multinational Swiss security firm, to create an authentication technology that will allow everyone along the supply chain to correctly identify Clariant’s plastic packaging and devices. As the folks at Clariant put it in a statement announcing the new partnership: “This enables pharmaceutical companies to monitor their products from factory to pharmacy, identify emerging trends and improve response times if action is required,” said Clariant in a statement.
Originally targeted at the pharmaceutical and medical device sector, the Plastiward system takes the form of a security additive developed by SICPA that can be incorporated into polymer master batches before they are used to create plastic goods. This ensures that, no matter where the products are in the supply chain, they can be tracked, traced and verified as 100% authentic.
SICPA’s director of new channels and partnerships notes just how important this partnership is: “The rise of e-commerce and access to new technologies has accelerated counterfeiting and other forms of illicit trade, [so]we have to stay ahead through innovation”. Fortunately, SICPA have been around for years, constantly growing and innovating so they could hardly be in finer hands with the Plastiward system being a particularly perfect system for their plastic-based products.
The resulting items by Clariant are now intrinsically tagged with this new addition, which can be detected immediately using a proprietary handheld scanner, allowing genuine goods to be distinguished from fakes in the supply chain. The scan data can also be uploaded to a secure platform, operated by SICPA, which can be utilized for live monitoring.
It’s a bold step forward for a company that has always placed premium importance on the quality and authenticity of their goods. With today’s black market as it is, it has become all too easy to create cheap, vastly inferior knock offs of quality goods and pass them off to unsuspecting customers, even to retailers, as the real thing. Clariant’s partnership with SICPA is a major step forward to putting a stop to that for their products and ensuring that retailers and customers alike get only the very best products on which Clariant has built its reputation.
The new security platform and how it implements with Clariant’s products will be presented at this year’s CPhI congress in Barcelona.
