During the meet, representatives from seven prominent brands made the presentations on the future of labels and what brands are looking at in terms of efficiency and innovations.

The speakers included Pavankumar Chougule, associate director, Dr Reddy’s; Santanu Chowdhary, associate director, Sun Pharma; Naveen Stuart, packaging development manager, Reckitt Benckiser; Tamal Ghosh, DGM, Dabur India; Soumyanath Mishra, global head- packaging and development, Mankind Research Centre; Somnath Chatterjee, GM, procurement, Pernod Ricard and Barun Banerjee, head, packaging development, Nestle.

Kuldeep Goel, president, LMAI, in his opening remarks, said that today label printers need to decide which machine to opt for among digital printing presses, hybrid printing presses and value-addition equipment.

Pavankumar Chougule, associate director, Dr Reddy’s said that packaging is equally important in pharma packaging as the medicine is. India supplies medicines to all major pharma markets the USA, Japan, China, Germany, France, Brazil, Italy, UK, Canada and Spain. Thus, Indian converters need to know the expectations from domestic and overseas markets.

Santanu Chowdhary, associate director, Sun Pharma, shared his views on a new type of technology which requires normal CMYK printing, where physical label does fantastic with digital and artificial intelligence, where converter can embed codes on printed labels with a small change in artwork and data will be saved on cloud.

The meet ended with an hour-long panel discussion moderated by Harveer Sahni of Weldon Celloplast.

At the event, Manish Desai, chairman, LMAI, announced that the next edition of the biennial LMAI Conference will take place in Kochi, Kerala from 25 to 28 July 2019.

Desai said this year 156 companies have registered to attend the event, along with 35 sponsors and 514 delegates.