Package Design - January/February 2013 - 17

The company is currently developing a tracking
system that enables fish to be purchased online as
it’s being unloaded from a boat. That very evening,
the prebought fish will be packaged in a tamperevident zippered pouch with a QR code on it.
“We can use this technology to offer people a
peep-hole into the supply chain,” he says. “And the
packaging is amazing. No smell, minimal waste, all
you’re throwing away this tiny plastic bag, or you’re
washing it and recycling it, hopefully.”
Adding QR codes to product packaging needn’t
be intrusive or unattractive. Quite the opposite,
and Vancouver’s Ethical Bean Coffee is proof that
tracking and design can work together.
Wanting to give consumers the ability to obtain
in-depth information about where its coffee was
coming from, Ethical Bean added QR codes to its
packages. The bags are silver—a homage to Apple
design—and the design incorporates color coding
for each coffee type. Lloyd Bernhardt, president,
says the brand originally had tried putting the QR
code on the front, but it was too distracting, so
Ethical Bean placed a large code on the back
where it would be easy for consumers to see, with
the directive “scan me.” “We’ve had a lot of really
positive responses from retailers and consumers,”
he says. “It’s a point of differentiation for us as well
because there’s a lot of coffee in the world.”

Track-and-trace arms race
For brand owners who want—or need—to protect
their products from counterfeiting and diversion,
new package design technologies are at the forefront of the fight.
What products are actually the targets of counterfeiters? Everything, says Dr. John Spink, professor at the Anti-Counterfeiting and Product
Protection Program at Michigan State University.
“We had this misperception that it was limited to
luxury goods,” he says. “But probably only 5 to 10%
of all counterfeiting is in what we would consider
luxury goods.”
“Brand owners and designers should stay one
step ahead of counterfeiters with a portfolio of
anti-counterfeiting features available for quick
implementation,” says Spink. “All built in a series,
so everything builds off the previous series. That’s
how the best-run companies line it up.”
The aim is to make counterfeiting and diversion
challenging enough so a brand’s products will be an
unattractive target, and the counterfeiters and
diverters will give up. Pharmaceutical companies,
for example, will often use a proprietary bottle and
cap, according to Spink, which counterfeiters
would have difficulty obtaining, and so would have
to make their own—likely enough of a barrier that
they’d move on to another victim.

Each bag of
Ethical Bean
Coffee has a
unique QR
code that
consumers can
use to explore
the journey that
a specific group
of beans took
to get to them.

PACKAGEDESIGNMAG.COM

Package Design - January/February 2013

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