Packaging with more communication

These days, pack­ag­ing for phar­ma and health­care prod­ucts is much more than sim­ply a pro­tec­tive cov­er­ing. It now plays an impor­tant role in com­mu­ni­cat­ing infor­ma­tion and can sup­port direct inter­ac­tion between man­u­fac­tur­er and user. The August Fall­er Group sup­plies phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal prod­uct man­u­fac­tur­ers with a broad-based range of inno­v­a­tive pack­ag­ing and pack­ag­ing com­po­nents pre­cise­ly geared to these require­ments. Such com­po­nents include indi­vid­ual fold­ing car­tons, labels, pack­age inserts and com­bi­na­tion prod­ucts as well as inter­ac­tive, dig­i­tal solu­tions. The com­pa­ny has now sum­marised the whole range in the form of a white paper.
The role of pack­ag­ing as a com­mu­ni­ca­tion space and infor­ma­tion car­ri­er con­tin­ues to gain in impor­tance. Patients, phar­ma­cists and doc­tors expect more than just the details required by law — they now want use­ful infor­ma­tion on the cor­rect way to use a prod­uct. Also, the addi­tion­al safe­ty fea­tures — like tam­per-evi­dent clo­sures and the 2D data matrix code — required by the EU Anti-Coun­ter­feit­ing Direc­tive can reduce the amount of space avail­able on pack­ag­ing for com­mu­ni­cat­ing infor­ma­tion — which makes it nec­es­sary to devel­op new pack­ag­ing solu­tions. Fur­ther­more, pack­ag­ing design is increas­ing­ly influ­enc­ing pur­chas­ing deci­sions, espe­cial­ly with regard to over-the-counter drugs.

Folding carton with additional uses

In order to expand the space avail­able for com­mu­ni­ca­tion on the con­ven­tion­al fold­ing car­ton, the firm cre­ates indi­vid­ual solu­tions with inte­grat­ed or com­bined infor­ma­tion car­ri­ers for their cus­tomers. Fold­ing car­tons can be enhanced by a vari­ety of means — by addi­tion­al flaps, e.g. with a longer rear side, by an inter­nal or exter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion space or by inte­grat­ed prod­ucts, such as the leaflet or mul­ti­page label.

Allrounder label

The Group’s solu­tions for adhe­sive labels for use on vials, tubes and bot­tles can be just as var­ied in design — they range from mul­ti­lay­er labels through mul­ti­page and wrap-around labels to spe­cial solu­tions such as a com­bined form of pack­age insert and label.

Reinterpretation of an elementary component — the leaflet

The leaflet as an essen­tial com­po­nent of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal pack­ag­ing is at the heart of the August Fall­er Group’s range of skills. The spe­cial­ist pro­duc­er bun­dles sev­er­al leaflet types in many dif­fer­ent ways. These include band­ing machine, adhe­sion and shrink-wrap­ping tech­niques. The bun­dles can then be placed or dis­pensed into a fold­ing carton.

Digital communication with extra advantages

Fall­er’s range also cov­ers dig­i­tal solu­tions, which enable valu­able addi­tion­al func­tions, as well as inter­ac­tion between med­ica­tion users and man­u­fac­tur­ers. Also, drug pack­ag­ing can fea­ture con­ven­tion­al QR codes or more recent tech­nolo­gies such as Near Field Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (NFC) and Aug­ment­ed Reality.