The brand’s reputation

Brand owners are vigilant, ensuring the safety of their products and hence give due diligence to topics that may impact the safety of their products. Brand owners keep upgrading themselves to assure the safety of their products to make sure that consumer trust in their products remains intact. They understand clearly that a single product safety recall would not only produce heavy costs of non-compliance but would also damage their brand reputation and affect the future sales of their product. So, from a food business operator’s perspective, it’s imperative to deploy only safe packaging inks for their packaging materials, or else it will sooner or later result in a food safety scandal that will impact the entire packaging supply chain.

The converter optimism

Companies across the globe are setting sights on the growth prospects of the Indian market. This will eventually lead to more investments in the country and therefore will require packaging materials as per their global specifications. Moreover, the exports of the packaging material itself will witness positive growth. Converters are keen to grab these opportunities and hence, need to move towards safe ink systems harmonising with the best available global specifications.

Stringent food safety regulations

The Indian authorities are making constant efforts to upgrade their standards and benchmark them based on stringent global standards. Such an approach is imperative not only to ensure consumer well-being but also to open up global markets. However, on the flip side, in some cases, the authorities are becoming more vigilant than ever. This, in turn, puts pressure on the supply chain partners to align and deliver safe products. Thus, a smooth and efficient system has to be devised.

The most critical thing to note is that food business operators are legally responsible to ensure food-grade packaging material for their food products.

Developments in sustainability may counteract compliance

Brand owners and packaging developers are constantly designing new packaging structures (lower thickness / less layers / monomaterial) and utilising innovative materials. At the same time, they have high safety & sustainability standards for their packaging. Printing ink must, therefore, be formulated to ensure that migration risk is minimised at constant ink performance. It again emphasises the need for migration optimised inks (safe inks) to safeguard the packaging supply chain from any migration-related concerns even with the new packaging structures. In a nutshell, sustainability and safety will only go together.

The cost-effective supply chain may ignore product safety

The Indian market has always been a competitive cost market where solutions are aimed at being cost-effective to generate revenues. It, however, induces a probability where the effectiveness of barrier properties of the advanced solution is overlooked and hence again necessitates the need for migration-optimised inks. It’s a well-acknowledged but less realised fact that the cost of non-compliance is much higher than the cost of compliance.

Validation of the final article is an untold story

Several regulations across the globe emphasise the final validation of the printed article. Such validation requires a good amount of information to be shared between the supply chain partners as well as fairly good analytical costs, which many converters tend to avoid. Migration-optimised inks are not a replacement for the task but support the manufacturer to minimise migration risks and produce a safe and compliant final printed article consistently.

Foreseeable direct contact is an unspoken concern

There are packaging applications where either the product comes into direct contact with packaging inks or the consumer has direct oral contact with packaging inks, and often these contacts are foreseeable. For such contacts, it’s extremely important that we use inks that are designed explicitly for the purpose (if available) or only migration-optimised inks.

Good manufacturing practices need control

Many packaging converters, deploy different ink systems depending upon the application and brand owner compliance requirements. However, it is always advisable to completely switch over to migration-optimised ink systems for food and food-like applications considering consumer safety. It helps converters to have better control over good manufacturing practices (GMP) and build their reputation in the market in the context of delivering safe packaging material for customers.

Ethical and moral responsibility

It is the ethical and moral responsibility of all stakeholders in the packaging chain to deliver safe packaging material when the intended application is (especially): food products, pharmaceutical products as well as other consumer products which may directly or indirectly have an impact on the health of the consumer.

Packaging material itself a source

Packaging materials can serve as a source of hazardous components such as lead. It has been associated with glass, phthalates with metal, BPA with plastics, o-phenyl phenol with aluminium cans, mineral oils with recycled board, and much more. The use of optimised migration optimised ink systems doesn’t impact negatively compliant packaging materials and doesn’t contribute to existing levels of hazardous components.

Summing up, safe ink systems are not a replacement but an essential pre-requisite for the good practices that the stakeholders in the packaging supply chain must adhere to. They support the printer and brand owners to minimise migration risks and to produce a safe product for the consumers. 

The key is to understand that migration optimised inks are safe inks with the best standards acknowledging the value of human safety, health and life. 

(Jatin Takkar is the head, product safety and regulatory, Siegwerk India.)