Today (28 March) packaging manufacturing company Sidel announced that French cosmetic brand Guerlain has put traceability first by adopting its latest end-of-line technology to combat counterfeiting.
Sidel, a subsidiary company of global packaging company Tetra Pak, has supplied Guerlain with its combi packing/palletising solution for bottles in cartons, which also delivers product care and compactness on the cosmetic brand’s new line. Guerlain, a subsidiary company of luxury goods company LMVH, will house the new packaging solution at its main production site at La Ruche in France.
Sidel says it has an existing strong relationship with LMVH as many other luxury brands have chosen its robotic case packers, palletisers and combi solutions. The company also says that it has seen industries such as the pharmaceutical, champagne and cognac industries adopt Sidel technology for its traceability and aggregation capabilities.
“Sidel embedded every aspect of product labelling, control and rejection that we requested, and adapted the end-of-line process to suit our traceability needs,” said investment capacity project manager at Guerlain Aurélien Bernier.
The Sidel-designed robotic packaging and palletising combi solution manages the physical flow of products, cases and pallets while having the capability to handle 60 cartons per minute in four formats. Sidel says that each carton, case and pallet is tagged using barcodes and labels that are read, recorded and aggregated into the Guerlain central database. This allows Guerlain to access the database at any time to guarantee a product’s origin and full characteristics to combat counterfeiting and misdelivery.
“We were aware of Sidel’s reputation for high levels of traceability and were very impressed by its ability to tailor and fine-tune the automation to our process needs and traceability requirements,” continued Aurélien.
“Sidel also had to adapt their machine automation and communication protocols into our IT and central database set-up – we can’t permit modifications because the same system is used throughout LVMH Group perfume and cosmetics facilities.”
Traceability is seen as an important factor within the packaging industry. In an exclusive commentary for Packaging Gateway, Dereck Lupton, UK territory manager at ERP provider Epicor, said: “In the food and beverage processing world, traceability is becoming about more than general food safety or listing ingredients, as environmental legislation and rising consumer demand for sustainable products are having a big impact on manufacturing and distribution processes from field to fork.”
Rory Gopsill, an analyst at Packaging Gateway’s parent company GlobalData, said exclusively that traceability is an increasingly important issue for packaging companies because it is an increasingly important issue for consumer goods companies.
“Supply chain transparency is an important component of consumer goods companies’ ESG initiatives – they want to be able to reassure consumers that their products are manufactured, stored and transported in an ethical way,” he commented.
“As a result, numerous packaging and packaging machinery companies are providing specialised packaging that supports product traceability. For example, in 2021, Avery Dennison launched atma.io, a cloud-based supply chain management platform. This uses digital labels such as QR codes to assign unique digital identities to products and track, store and manage all data associated with said product’s journey from the production line to the consumer.”
