In Search of Affordable, Unbeatable Security Printing

Like many printers these days, The Challenge Printing Co. (Wallington, NJ, and Broadway, NC) is being asked by customers how it can help foil counterfeiters. "Some time ago, the director of package development at one of our largest customers approached us with concerns about the counterfeiting of pharmaceutical products," explains Challenge's Margaret Polt. "Our customer had become increasingly alarmed after the latest incident in the United States and was hoping we could offer a solution. After talking with other customers, we learned that many are worried." At that point, Challenge set out to develop new methods for the prevention and detection of counterfeiting.

The firm developed a list of parameters to follow when building a solution that involves packaging components, namely package inserts and labels. Polt explains that a successful solution has to be:

• Dynamic. "We have to incorporate change in our solution, in order to make it increasingly difficult for counterfeiters to discover what we did."
   
• Secret. "Our directive is that the fewer people who know about the details, the better. It is important to even minimize the number of customer representatives aware of the solution's details."
   
• Inexpensive. "Since our customer intended to apply this solution throughout its entire product line, it was important that our ideas would be economically viable."

After extensive testing conducted by its new-product development group, Challenge unveiled its SecurePrint solution. "Through this process, we are able to add randomized authentication details to undisclosed portions of labels and inserts," says Polt. "Such messages are extremely difficult to locate, identify, and duplicate, thereby creating more built-in security for the products that these packaging components label."

As part of its Security Authentication Protocol, Challenge creates encoded artwork and randomized authentication details and assigns and reassigns the positioning of those details. Throughout this entire process, access to messages is controlled via multiple-level passwords. The actual details regarding message assignment and positioning are made known only to a handful of individuals between Challenge and each customer.