NETHERLANDS – Digital inkjet printers, label and packaging solutions manufacturer SCREEN Europe in collaboration with Swiss software-as-a-service company Scantrust to help consumers and brands combat counterfeiting.
The two companies will work together to combine digital printing technology and a patented process for developing secure QR codes.
The integrated technology will allow consumers and brand owners to easily and quickly verify the authenticity of a particular secure code.
Secure QR codes can be scanned using a smartphone camera, similar to any regular QR code. As part of this collaboration, Scantrust provided its anti-counterfeiting technology, which uses a secure graphic embedded into a QR Code.
Secure graphic, according to SCREEN, has a high information density and can naturally degrade during any printing or copying attempt.
The companies said that there is additional information loss that can be detected in case of any unauthorized reproductions, as counterfeits depend on a second printing. This additional loss of information also helps in differentiating copies from originals.
SCREEN Europe marketing director Juan Cano said: “Our partnership with Scantrust is crucial to meet the growing demand for connected packaging through the use of unique serialized QR codes for product authentication, brand-to-consumer engagement and supply chain visibility.”
Additionally, SCREEN used its Truepress L350UV SAI digital inkjet technology to provide fine line resolution and required sharpness for printing thousands of unique QR codes onto the labels.
It helped in handling large amounts and sizes of variable data needed for printing serialized and unique QR codes at scale.
Scantrust CEO and co-founder Nathan J. Anderson added: “SCREEN Europe’s Truepress L350 is ideal for printing Scantrust secure QR codes on labels, as it is designed to produce the high-quality prints required for Scantrust’s patented copy detection process.
“In addition, SCREEN Europe’s inkjet label printer does so in a cost-effective way, making it a perfect system for protecting brands and consumers from counterfeit products.”
The project comes at a time when, the demand for printing secure and serialized QR codes is ‘rapidly increasing’, as brand owners seek to protect their products against counterfeits as well as build a closer relationship with consumers through connected packaging.
Having experienced a resurgence in the use of QR codes during the COVID-19 pandemic, companies that depend on selling physical goods in an increasingly online, connected world have taken note that smart packaging and QR code use gained more attention
As secure QR codes are built on regular QR codes, they contain all the convenience and functionality users have come to expect but they go beyond standard QR codes with a robust copy detection feature.
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