Conquering Counterfeiting with Security Printing

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Counterfeited cigarettes have become an increasingly serious problem in many markets and cigarette manufacturers can protect their brands through various security printing solutions. Tobacco Asia looks at some remarkable options.

By Thomas Schmid

Some market regions - particularly the wider Middle East but also Africa and Eastern Europe - are awash with counterfeited cigarettes (and smuggled contraband), causing legitimate manufacturers millions in lost revenues every year, not to mention serious brand image erosion. And as cigarettes get increasingly more expensive across Western Europe and many parts of Asia, the problem gradually takes hold there as well. But to protect their brands, and by extension, their revenues, tobacco companies can deploy a number of surprisingly sophisticated security printing innovations either on packaging or even the sticks themselves.

Conquering Counterfeiting with Security Printing

Tannpapier GmbH

Conquering Counterfeiting with Security Printing

Tannpapier-manufactured tear tape with metallic, color-shifting security effects

Superior security features from TANN Group

TANN Group, headquartered in the town of Traun, Austria is synonymous with being a reliable and highly innovative supplier of printing products and methodologies to the tobacco industry. Technical services manager Dr. Michael Lindner divulges that the company is being regularly approached by cigarette manufacturers either on their own accord or because regulatory changes necessitate it, inquiring “whether we can offer possibilities for superior security features for tobacco products with respect to anti-counterfeiting measures.”

“The focus hereby is put on ‘smart safety’ items, which we can realize with tipping papers, inner liners, clear closure labels, and tear tapes,” Dr. Lindner says. He adds that those inquiries are mostly “related to countries where our customers produce and where they face a high illicit trade incidence.” “Furthermore, more regulations are coming into place with regards to bringing the illicit trade under control and to have more visibility-of-movement of tobacco products.”

“We started with the first commercial deliveries of clear closure labels to Mexico at the beginning of 2010,” Dr. Lindner recalls, adding that the country had issued new regulations at that time which required that health warnings be placed on the upper part of cigarette soft packs. As packs traditionally were sealed with paper labels, this suddenly was no longer possible as they would have partially obscured the warnings. “A perfect solution to that issue were clear closing labels.”

Only at a later stage did it dawn on TANN Group that clear closure labels potentially also could serve as a security measure for cigarette packs. ”Unprinted clear closure labels exhibit a relatively low level of security because they theoretically can be made of any flat and flexible transparent material, like different polymer films. However, if these labels are being combined with sophisticated and elevated printing effects, the protection level will be tremendously increased,” Dr. Lindner elaborates. “On the one hand there is only a limited number of transparent materials available that are suitable for such special-effect printing and on the other hand it requires huge experience to flawlessly print them with those sophisticated features,” he explains. These security features on the labels could, therefore, be used both by the authorities as well as TANN Group’s customers to check the product integrity.

“Our expertise is rotogravure printing technology, which is suitable for realizing a wide range of outstanding printing effects,” Dr. Linder asserts. Apart from utilizing a huge variety of spot colors [a.k.a. multi-colors], metallic inks, pearlescent coatings, and half-tone designs, even color changes or color shifts, thermo-chrome and UV-active [i.e. fluorescence] functionalities are feasible.” And in order to achieve pure holographic or perfectly shiny metallic effects, Dr. Lindner recommends the application of hot foils, a technology widely used in the tipping paper industry that counterfeiters find practically impossible to emulate.

“Simply speaking, a multi-color printed or hot foil-stamped clear closure label represents a considerably more enhanced anti-counterfeiting feature than a simple [paper] label with a single-color printed logo,” Dr. Linder insists. However, he also admits that the industry so far generally applies clear closure labels only for their main purpose of making packs regulation-compliant, but not necessarily as a direct security feature. “As an indirect security feature, yes, as TANN Group is able to supply multi-color printed labels.”

Taggants (“virtual fingerprints”) are yet another security technology that has been successfully employed by TANN Group for some time. “Taggant systems are very valuable covert forensic tools for brand protection and identification,” confirms Ralf Schaffranke, sales manager at TANN Germany, a member of the TANN Group. Most of the currently common Taggant systems work on the principle of up-converting phosphorus and converting invisible infrared light into visible colored light. By contrast, TANN Group offers taggant technologies that work on the basis of uniformly doped, rare-earth materials and unique spectral signatures that can only be detected with specifically programmed readers. “TANN Germany has been supplying this covert authentication feature for many years and is offering it for different products, like tear tapes, for example,” Schaffranke says.

TANN Group’s tear tapes are in fact ideal carriers for overt, semi-covert, and covert security features, like visible and non-visible special inks or taggants that can help protect brand integrity. “We have developed and are providing for the markets bespoke combinations of overt security features such as sophisticated print designs including micro text and fine-line printing, as well as security inks like ‘color-shifting’ OVI inks that are near-to-impossible to be reproduced by unauthorized parties. That way we support brand values and protect brands against counterfeiting and plagiarism,” Schaffranke says.

And for an even greater security level different types of specific molecular taggants (a.k.a. anti-stroke inks) can be applied to tear tapes, imparting unique spectral signatures that can be authenticated in a laboratory. Considering the wide range of security features on offer, tear tapes, being an integral part of any cigarette packaging, present themselves “as the most cost-effective carrier for security features,” Schaffranke asserts.

China: counterfeiting affects local and foreign brands alike

Thanks to a very large smoking populace, China boasts a myriad of local cigarette brands in addition to the offerings from regional and multinational tobacco companies. Especially the brands of the latter ones, often iconic and thus coveted by local smokers as a status symbol, are routinely counterfeited and/or smuggled – to the detriment of their respective brand owners. But the counterfeiting scourge routinely affects local brands as well. One way to protect themselves is by using very elaborate packaging that more often than not incorporates sophisticated holographic design elements.

Suzhou Image Laser Technology Co. Ltd. has pioneered the optical anti-counterfeiting industry for the best part of three decades. Based in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, the company has some time ago integrated its advanced optical security technologies to provide cigarette manufacturers with a complete anti-counterfeiting package solution, which includes tax stamps, tear tapes, holographic BOPP shrink films, hot stamping foils, and cigarette boxes. Besides supplying local manufacturers, has even managed to capture a considerable market in Europe, North and South America, according to sales director, Jack Zhang.

To produce the impressive holographic and color-shifting designs for which Suzhou Image has become renowned both at home and abroad, the company deploys an interesting new technology known as “no-ink printing” (NIP).  ”It is neither generated by a conventional printing plate nor through inkjet printing,” says Zhang, adding that the technique, which today also is often used for national ID cards and other official documents, can be applied on both soft packs and hard boxes as per the customer’s requirements.

NIP is achieved by utilizing physical color rendering methods such as diffraction, refraction, interference, scattering, and waveguides generated within the micro-nano structure to partially or completely replace ink printing to represent characters and display black-and-white and color images. The two important aspects of NIP are that it is highly secure and environmentally friendly. It also can minimize or even completely eliminate the evaporation and emission of ink, solvents, and dampening solutions, reducing VOC residues and heavy metal pollution. NIP is thus regarded as one of the most effective advancements in the area of environmental-protection printing.

The core technology behind ink-free printing and the manufacture of the mother plate was developed by Suzhou Laser’s c.e.o., Hu Zuyaun. Hu has been engaged in the field of optical anti-counterfeiting technology for more than 30 years, has vast expertise in the area of optical security and has presided over or participated in dozens of national, provincial and ministerial-level science and technology projects.

What makes NIP an excellent candidate for an almost impossible-to-emulate security printing method is the extreme technical difficulty under which the optical patterns are produced. “The patterns impart overt, covert and forensic security features at the same time,” Zhang elaborates. The overt security features include 2D/3D, flip-flop, and color shifting designs. While covert security features may comprise micro text or images of just 0.02mm text in height and visible only under magnification. However, Zhang declines to discuss closer details of the forensic security features as they are confidential.

But Zhang also hints at the fact that NIP is not super cheap. There is a considerable cost factor involved, at least initially, as “the tooling development is expensive compared with conventional printing methods.” Though once set up, the cost factor will taper down as forthwith no consumables like ink are needed for production. “And the higher the output quantity, the cheaper it becomes,” he claims. Artwork designs are generally supplied by the customer, then aesthetically enhanced and rendered with the already described methods by Suzhou Laser’s in-house design team. “But of course we also can provide design proposals, and do so regularly,” Zhang adds.

Apart from cigarette soft packs and hard boxes, NIP can also be used on stickers, closure labels, and tear tapes, both on paper and plastic films such as PET, PETG, BOPP, MOPP, PVC, and others. As desired, QR codes may be incorporated into stickers and labels as well, which would serve track & trace and authentication purposes. Besides a growing number of cigarette manufacturers, Suzhou Laser is offering its security printing products to the vaping industry, too, where it is primarily deployed on packaging materials.

AlpVision: hands-on solutions

AlpVision SA of Switzerland, with offices in the US and China and represented by printers in more than 50 countries worldwide provides security printing products for the tobacco and vaping industries such as Cryptoglyph and Fingerprint.

Launched in 2001, Cryptoglyph was first deployed on cigarette packaging in 2007. While the technology has been adopted by manufacturers around the globe, AlpVision’s current key market is Europe, according to the company’s c.e.o., Dr. Fred Jordan. “Cryptoglyph is basically an invisible pattern that is integrated in the varnish layer [of outer packaging] and is compliant with 100% of the printing solutions conventionally used for tobacco packaging.”

To be more precise, Cryptoglyph embeds a pseudo-random pattern of microdots measuring 10-20 microns in diameter in the printed material and across its entire surface. “The security pattern, which is completely invisible to the naked eye, is applied by traditional printing techniques like offset lithography, flexography, or rotogravure. Indeed, no special printing unit nor special consumable [ink] is required,” Dr. Jordan elaborates. ”The microdots are only penetrating the varnish layer to a fraction of its thickness, so it is a modulation of the surface shape rather than the creation of actual holes.” And there is more to it: Besides being applied to packaging surfaces, the technology can even be used on the individual cigarette stick, for example by embedding the microdots on filter tip wrappers.

The second security printing technology developed by AlpVision is Fingerprint, which primarily is deployed by vaping product and e-cigarette manufacturers. Fingerprint can be used for authenticity verification of molded, stamped, rolled or tooled objects such as plastic bottles and caps for vaping liquids, for example, but also on e-cigarette and/or atomizer bodies. “It could potentially also work on glass bottles, but as far as we know that has actually never been tried,” says Dr. Jordan. “And when applying Fingerprint on vaping liquid containers, we would recommend authenticating the caps, which are often tamper proof, in order to avoid refilling issues.”

Fingerprint works on a simple principle, namely that each and any mold, stamp, or tooling gadget imparts microscopic material imperfections on its surface that are just as unique as a human fingerprint. The irregularities will invariably transfer to the surfaces of vials, bottles, caps, e-cigarette hulls (you name it) during production, “imprinting” them on the surface. It is very much comparable to what is being done in forensic criminology by tying a bullet to the gun barrel from which it was fired.