Sidel equips Guerlain with traceability technology to prevent counterfeiting

FRANCE – Packaging manufacturing company Sidel has provided its new end-of-line and traceability technologies to the French perfume and cosmetics business Guerlain to prevent counterfeiting.

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, palletizers 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.

Aurélien Bernier, investment capacity project manager at Guerlain said: “Sidel embedded every aspect of product labeling, control and rejection that we requested, and adapted the end-of-line process to suit our traceability needs.”

The Sidel-designed robotic packaging and palletizing combi solution manage 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 an industry where counterfeiting and parallel markets account for US$509 billion USD in losses of consumer goods. And where more than US$112 billion are invested only in anti-counterfeiting packaging.

The economic losses for brands are obvious, but there is a much greater loss and it is the brand image. Being in markets that brands do not choose seriously damages prestige and sales strategy and indirectly produces a considerable income decrease.

For the brand, serialization provides in real time a precise overview of production volumes and allows access to the identification data of each product. Product serialization brings many benefits to brands and at different levels within the company.

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