Industry:Packaging and Labeling Added By:Admin Posted On:Aug. 9, 2019
Packaging and labeling a product involves many routine but exacting tasks. Teams must sort out every component being packed, confirm each one meets legal and regulatory requirements, and fit brand and advertising needs onto the label. This article covers the main packaging and labeling challenges across industries, including pharmaceuticals, and what helps address them.
Many companies lack digital or advanced equipment for packaging and labeling, so they rely on manual processes. These take a long time, depend heavily on the people doing them and delay products on the way to their destination. Every manual handoff is also another chance for an error, such as a wrong label or a missing piece of information.
The pharmaceutical industry is among the hardest hit, with production often held up by slow packaging and labeling. Other factors add to the delay, such as limited floor space and outsourcing the artwork used on packaging and labels.
With digital design tools, companies keep creating new packaging styles to make products look distinctive and reach more customers quickly. Variety helps sales, but it puts heavy pressure on the people who design and build labels that look appealing and strengthen the brand.
The artwork production team must meet the strict requirements set by the authority that regulates packaging and labeling. At the same time, it must satisfy the brand owner’s marketing requirements. Balancing both makes the design process far more complicated. A design that pleases the brand team may not leave room for required warnings, and a label built only around the regulations may not help the product stand out on the shelf. Every change has to be reviewed against both sets of requirements before it goes to print.
When a company runs its own artwork production and packaging department instead of outsourcing, the process becomes faster and more cost-efficient, and it avoids large fees for outside services.
Moving to fully automated packaging and labeling is expensive, though. It requires a range of advanced equipment, along with the staff and training to run and maintain it, and that upfront cost is another major challenge for the industry, especially for smaller firms.
The payoff is real. Automated lines pass information from one step to the next, which prevents one product’s label from being printed on another. They package large volumes in a short time and are far less cumbersome than manual work.
Selling in a country where English is not the main language means labels must follow that country’s regulations and use its languages, such as French, German or Spanish. This is harder than it sounds.
A company with in-house artwork production needs designers who can work in several languages. If it has none, it should hire people who can read and write those languages as fluently as native speakers. That adds cost and can double the work compared with English-only labels. Every translated version also has to be checked against the local rules, so review time grows with each new market.
Multilingual labels also run into limited space and the choice of container. Teams must decide on container size while still including every required element, such as child safety information, dosage, age guidance, medication details, nutrition facts and ingredients.
Choosing suitable colors and meeting medical standards for medicine packaging adds more work. For safety, labels must be prepared with great care and should explain how to use the product and how to dispose of it after use. Meeting all these requirements quickly, and at high volume, is demanding.
Effective packaging and labeling depends on ongoing control of quality, quantity and safety. When a company meets every regulatory requirement and gets those three factors right, the process runs smoothly and products reach the market on time.
Automating with modern equipment makes packaging and labeling faster, more cost-effective and less physically demanding for workers.