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Mike Ridgway is the director of the UK-based Consumer Packaging Manufacturers Alliance, or CPMA. Having been professionally involved in the UK and European packaging industry for more than four decades, he founded CPMA to act as a packaging industry voice to support its future in a world where packaging for all types of consumer products is forced to deal with increasingly tough regulations. In this context, Ridgway also is an outspoken critic of plain packaging for tobacco products.
Tobacco Asia (TA): How do you define plain packaging for tobacco products, primarily cigarettes? What design or graphical elements must be present - or in this case, absent - for it to be actually plain?
Mike Ridgway (MR): It’s packaging with limited communication on it about the product. The main feature is a health warning on both back and front panels, and then health warnings on the top and on the sides. There is also a common color, olive green, which is allowed on the sides and other areas of the pack. So when you consider the health warnings and also bar codes and side health warnings, it leaves no room for product marketing or descriptions
TA: So it’s not really “plain”, is it?
MR: Calling it “plain” has emerged in the sense of it being “plain of marketing” and any printing or graphical enhancements that demonstrate the brand and the actual product.
TA: What do tobacco regulators purportedly want to achieve with this plain packaging?
MR: Well, it’s difficult to define that. Different things are said by different people. When this was first introduced in Australia in 2012, there were three main objectives stated at the time: to decrease smoking levels; to increase awareness of smoking; and to reduce smoking among young people. But when I look at these objectives, they all have failed.
TA: So plain packaging has not been a resounding success…?
MR: I believe it’s a failure and a lot of other people share my opinion. Well, smoking levels have come down in almost all markets -- but what’s the connection between that and plain packaging? There is none. When you analyze what causes a reduction in smoking levels, the biggest factor is actually the price of the product and the taxation.
TA: Plain packaging also seems to be playing into the hands of manufacturers of fake brand products. Compared to the state-of-the-art packaging designs that were historically prevalent in the cigarette industry, plain packaging is very easy and cheap to reproduce by pretty much anyone with a desktop printer.
MR: Yes, plain packaging has taken some sophistication out of the design. Carton board hinge lid blanks are a very technically exacting product. It’s not just the printing. It’s hot foil stamping, it’s embossing, it’s debossing, it’s using special varnishes, gloss varnishes, matte varnishes and so on, all of which enhance the product and market the brand name. But when plain packaging was introduced, all that was eliminated. So a pack without the enhancing features, that’s what makes it easier to fake, to pirate. Counterfeiters no longer need big, capital-intensive equipment.
TA: Quite a few other markets have since followed Australia’s lead. How many countries do currently have plain packaging for cigarettes?
MR: More than 100 countries worldwide have introduced health warnings that can take up virtually the whole of the pack. But should that be defined as “plain packaging”? The number of countries where you find true plain packaging along the lines of what I explained earlier… I believe there’s about 18 at the moment, with probably another 6 or 8 looking at it for introduction. Finland just introduced it on May 1, I think, and Armenia, Myanmar, and Georgia are planning it for 2024.
Thailand already introduced it in 2019, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and a couple of others in 2020. Malaysia toyed with the possibility but has not got around to it yet. Indonesia likewise hasn’t picked up that one yet either, neither have the Philippines. But I think Oman thinks of adopting the feature.
TA: You said earlier that plain packaging has not been a smashing success, so why is there still this worldwide obsession about introducing it? Why is that momentum not waning?
MR: Well, I can give you a very simple answer to that question… a three-letter answer, actually: WHO. The World Health Organization, I believe, has a mission to destroy the tobacco industry. They’re looking at every opportunity to get their member state countries to intro-duce plain packaging as a way of achieving that objective.
TA: Plain packaging is not the only idea anti-tobacco lobbyists are coming up with in their sometimes rather hilarious attempts at decreasing smoking rates, of course…
MR: Indeed. One example that did look as if it might actually happen, at least in the UK, was to print health warnings on each individual cigarette. I think it was a harebrained idea; and luckily it didn’t pass parliament. There even has been a suggestion a while ago, probably also derived during some brainstorming session, that when opening a flip top box to take out one stick, the consumer would hear an audio health warning coming from a little electronic chip! So… what would happen after two sticks? Would you get somebody singing an entire song, and after the third stick, you’d get a symphonic orchestra?
TA: That actually would be quite funny…. A little song like, “Don’t smoke, don’t you dare to smoke, it’s not goo-hood for you!”
MR: We shouldn’t give them any ideas because they’re going to do it. [laughs]