First use of Creo taggant on cosmetic packaging

Using concentrations as low as two parts per million, the ID powder is very difficult to reverse engineer using popular forensic analysis methods such as plasma mass spectrometry. Designed to identify and protect products from counterfeiting and theft Traceless is being hailed as a major new product for the Vancouver-based company.

A US-based cosmetics company has trialled the taggant for the past three months on the packaging of two product lines manufactured in western Europe.
The taggant is inserted into the cardboard packaging of a perfume brand as well as into the plastic casing for another cosmetics product.

According to Eddy Houba, Creo's director of business development who presented the product to the local security printing industry at a recent conference in Adelaide, one of the benefits of Tracless is the ease of application, as it is easily integrated into existing manufacturing lines. The taggant costs $250 for 1gram of the powder, enough to tag 3,500m2 of printed material. The readers can be linked to Creo database-driven software and a client database.

Brand piracy is estimated at US $960 billion or seven per cent of world trade and is growing at a rate of 15 per cent a year. Creo maintains that Traceless presents a unique form of brand protection because it operates under forensic detection levels so counterfeiters can't find it!