The result: ever tightening regulations regarding what this packaging should consist of. Just ask the carton producers, who have learned to live with recurrent concerns over the potential harm that might be caused by the migration of mineral inks via recycled board to food products. And all those affected by the planned ban on Bisphenol A – an industrial chemical used in the manufacture of rigid plastic packaging – in the French baby-food category next year.  

Of course packaging already has many tricks up its sleeve to ensure the safety and freshness of food. The metal can, the vacuum-packed joint of meat, the manipulation of the atmosphere within a film pouch that keeps fruit and veg fresh throughout a prolonged shelf-life... they’re all tried and trusted formats. But, thanks to new directives and evolving technologies, there are now even more, ever-more innovative solutions being rolled out.

Label legislation

Despite the graphic reminder courtesy of ‘Horsegate’ that we can’t always tell a pack by its cover, ingesting the content information and advice presented via its label is the first step towards realising a safe and hopefully nutritious diet. The scale of what this constitutes is set to increase with the implementation of EU Directive 1169  next month, mandating the provision of certain product data such as nutritional content, detailed allergen information, caffeine content, types of oil used and country of origin.

“The legislation is a good step in ensuring packaging is inclusive, provides accurate information and protects consumers. We’re already applying most of the regulations anyway so will be fully compliant by the deadline,” says Marks & Spencer primary foods packaging technologist Kevin Vyse. “Research shows that our customers want to know about the provenance of their food. It’s a key resource for consumers, and we’ve always sought to make it clear and engaging. By default this has led to better food standards and increased safety, which of course makes good business sense as well.”

The 1169 directive will also mandate a minimum text size of 1.2mm for labels of 80mm to ensure people don’t overlook the small print. “There are definitely occasions where pack size will have to increase to actually incorporate the legislation,” notes Vyse of the knock-on effect of both requirements. “At the moment what we’re trying to do is to hold cost neutrality, but it’s inevitably going to have an effect.”

So label converters capable of making the best use of the available print space look sure to be the obvious beneficiaries of EU 1169. West Midlands-based digital printer CS Labels has recently installed a £160,000 customised finishing system to support its extension into three-ply ‘peel and reveal’ applications that can accommodate five times the amount of text compared with a conventional single-face label. “The technology has enabled us to grow turnover by 5% of new business over the past 18 months,” says managing director Simon Smith. “And legislative changes can only drive demand still further.”

Also well placed to meet the challenges posed by EU 1169 is the leaflet label, which can compress as many as 48 pages of printed text and graphics into the same size as a standard self-adhesive label. 

Andrew Denny, chief executive of Fix-a-Form International, a company that supplies just this kind of product, has already noticed a change in the way his company’s products are being used.

“When it comes to food labelling, up until now a lot of these labels have been promotional devices,” says Denny. “However, as legislation requires a lot more information to be available via the pack, the format is increasingly being seen as the optimum cost-effective solution.”

In line with the escalating ownership of smartphones and tablets, the next generation of labels will not only exemplify the virtues of ‘less is more’, but could be fully interactive through the transition of the commonplace linear barcode into a 2D Datamatrix machine-readable code. While this transition is already underway, for example through the inclusion of QR codes on printed media to route consumers online, greater functionality has been limited by lack of capacity and also by its inability to relate to consumers on an individual basis. 

The adoption of the ECC 200 coding system, however, as the mandated preferred facilitator to implement the upcoming Falsified Medicines Directive – an EU initiative aimed at eliminating the spread of counterfeit products costing the global pharmaceutical industry an estimated £150bn per year – could indicate the way ahead for the retail food supply chain, says Domino global account manager Craig Stobie.

Benefits could include emailed reminders that the specific product is at its use-by date; and in the event of a product recall, the ability to discreetly pinpoint consumers with faulty packs rather than unleash the potentially harmful publicity of a catch-all announcement.

“You can’t have a conversation with a QR code; it’ll only tell you what to do. Because ECC 200 has the data capacity for unique serialisation on an individual pack or product basis, it has the potential to enable a consumer to interact with the brand one to one,” says Stobie.

He qualifies though that this Falsified Medicines Directive, and it bringing ECC 200 coding to the fore, has yet to seriously impact food retail. 

“The technology is in place, but not the infrastructure for using it yet. Not least as food manufacturers may be more inclined to see the requirement for 2D codes as a cost rather than a value,” he says. 

“In reality though, printing a 2D code onto a pack can actually be cheaper than a human-readable one. And as a lot of the labelling and pre-printed information that is currently required to be displayed on-pack is gradually phased out, imagine the potential for branding afforded by that freed-up real estate.”

Apps developed by specialists such as US company Harvest Mark and German  business CSB, capable of extending the remit of the 2D barcode beyond its manufacturing and distribution supply chain as a personalised channel of communication accessible to consumers, are already on the market. So it could be a simple progression to facilitating two-way personal communication. 

There are of course plenty of other paper scanning technologies being launched currently, including Ricoh’s Clickable Paper –which has so far, in its soft launch stage, been used mainly for magazines and brochures, but could be extended to packaging – and Documobi.

One such application, specifically geared towards label interactivity is North East-based pre-press specialist Reproflex3’s Packlinc. This new scanning technology taps into the growing willingness among some consumers to proactively interrogate the pack rather than decipher the small print on a label. Packlinc incorporates an interactive trigger located non-specifically within the halftone screening on a flexo-printed pack that can be read by a suitably app-enabled smartphone. 

Colour change tech

But while what’s in effect a virtual label allows access to far more information than could ever be contained on a printed one, for many consumers seeing is still the most reliable form of believing. Which brings to mind technologies such as thermochromic inks, which might be used to signal something about the pack, such as its life expectancy, in a highly immediate way. 

But while thermochromic inks are fine for denoting when, say, a can of lager is at a perfectly chilled temperature, what they can’t do is provide a visual cue to when a product is potentially unsafe to consume. So this is a gap in the market being explored by Edinburgh-based UWI Technology via a printed label that acts as a countdown clock. 

“It’s a multi-layer film solution incorporating a tiny reservoir of fluid calibrated to run at a predetermined rate, the seal of which is broken when the pack is first opened,” explains inventor and UWI (as in ‘use within’) chief executive Peter Higgins.

The technology operates independently of pack contents and can be adapted to react to differences caused by temperature changes from -1ºC up to +40 ºC. The business model is to license it on an application-by-application basis to appropriately equipped packer-fillers or converters.

“We’ve deliberately gone down the print route so that we can achieve a high-volume, low cost ratio. Without scale the theoretical unit cost of 10p-15p to produce the label doesn’t stack up; however, consumer research indicates that an additional 2p on an average jar of pasta sauce, for example, would be acceptable,” says Higgins.

But while UWI has attracted considerable interest from food producers, the uplift is still apparently 2p too much, for now. 

“What disappoints us is that the food industry spends millions of pounds in order to retain customer loyalty – the so-called ‘stickiness’ factor – yet wouldn’t this kind of reassurance be of more genuine value?” asks Higgins, who now believes that the aerospace and personal life sectors are more likely to take his self-funded and angel-invested £2m concept through to commercialisation.

So new techniques such as reactive inks may one day replace best-by dates on labels, but that’ll be dependent on a technology-savvy demographic. What is clear is that food scares and the subsequent legislation responding to contamination and infection risks are showing no signs of abating. And so technologies that can go some way to mitigating any risk and keeping an increasingly litigious consumer happy, healthy and aware of all the facts, could well start to hold sway.