Smart Packaging Enhances Your Brand

When it comes to protecting your products and enhancing your brand, Smart Packaging Solutions is an innovative technology that delivers on all fronts. This packaging is equipped with tiny electronic components such as LED lights, alarms, RFID chips and more to add functionalities that make your product stand out from the competition. These features are designed to enhance your brand by boosting engagement with customers and delivering impressive conveniences.

In addition to delivering consumer benefits, smart packaging can help businesses gain valuable data about their products and markets. This information can be used to increase the efficiency of manufacturing processes and develop new products that align with market needs. Moreover, companies can leverage smart packaging to monitor and track the lifecycle of their products in real time, thereby improving security against theft and providing better logistics management.

A typical smart packaging solution comprises an embedded sensor that enables it to collect data and communicate with a host system or mobile device. These sensors can be built into primary or secondary packaging materials or incorporated into existing products like food containers, medicine bottles and beverage cartons. A variety of technologies are being utilized in the smart packaging space, including barcodes, NFC/RFID tags, and printed and flexible sensors.

These technologies are being increasingly adopted by fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) players and are poised to become the dominant form of sensor-integrated packaging by 2023, according to IDTechEx’s new report “Smart Packaging 2023-2033.” Sensor technology is being integrated into traditional printed symbols such as QR codes or linear barcodes, as well as into digital labels, film, foil and other substrates.

The sensor capabilities being built into smart packaging can be divided into several categories, based on the type of information they gather. The most basic are time-temperature indicators (TTIs), which document thermal exposure and estimate the remaining shelf life of perishables. These can be in the form of irreversible chemical color changes caused by a distinctive image; enzyme-caused color changes proportional to cumulative time above an activation temperature; or simple thermal expansion thermometers with ongoing data logging.

For more complex uses, a sensor can detect physical changes, such as the presence of water or air. These can then trigger a specific response, such as a light flashing or an alarm sounding. This sort of information can be useful to retailers and supply chain partners, for example to verify product authenticity and support recalls. It can also be used to inform promotional campaigns, such as the use of augmented reality applications on smartphones to show consumers the product in a 3D environment or to highlight specific features.

Despite the many potential benefits of smart packaging, many businesses are still not embracing the technology. Several factors are limiting adoption, including a lack of established standards for infrastructure, identification, transport and data protocols, and the need to integrate smart packaging into broader industrial Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.

In order to overcome these challenges, a broad ecosystem of stakeholders must collaborate to develop a holistic approach to the integration of smart packaging into industrial supply chains. This will require multidisciplinary teams of experts in manufacturing, predictive modeling, analytical science, data analytics, criminology and business to define a systematic framework for implementing smart packaging.