Baijiu labels hide secrets
As a special category with both social attributes and high value-added attributes in the consumer goods market, the liquor industry has long faced severe anti-counterfeiting challenges. As a result, liquor labels have become the most technologically dense and innovative market segment in the entire label printing field, which can be called the "highland" of anti-counterfeiting technology.
Today's liquor labels, in addition to packaging and decoration functions, have also become a counterfeiting defense line integrating traditional technologies such as materials, design, process and digital traceability with cutting-edge technology, representing the highest level of process complexity in the current label printing field. Next, I will divide it into three articles to take you to deeply analyze the mainstream anti-counterfeiting technology in liquor labels, the analysis of anti-counterfeiting technology in typical application cases, and the future development direction of liquor labels, and discuss how to achieve the integration between process presentation and security assurance.
Due to the different grades of liquor labels, the anti-counterfeiting technology used is also different based on the actual needs and cost considerations of anti-counterfeiting. In this article, the author collects liquor labels with prices ranging from tens to hundreds of yuan for a comprehensive analysis, mainly using the following 5 anti-counterfeiting technologies.
01
Physical anti-counterfeiting
Physical anti-counterfeiting technology, also known as anti-counterfeiting technology of raw and auxiliary materials, mainly includes anti-counterfeiting printing materials and anti-counterfeiting inks. There are different categories of anti-counterfeiting printing materials, such as watermark paper, security line paper, securities paper, laser holographic materials, fragile paper, etc., and there are many types of anti-counterfeiting inks, such as ultraviolet fluorescent inks, infrared non-absorbent inks, temperature-varying inks, light-changing inks, etc.
In general, the anti-counterfeiting technology of printing materials is relatively straightforward and can be recognized with the naked eye, whereas most anti-counterfeiting ink technologies require the use of specialized detection instruments for identification, making them a secondary-level technology.
02
Design-Based Anti-Counterfeiting
Design-based anti-counterfeiting mainly involves using anti-counterfeiting design software to create graphics and text that are difficult to replicate, such as backgrounds, rosettes, latent images, and line-breaking designs, preventing the original drafts from being directly used through scanning. Labels designed with anti-counterfeiting software are often not printed using four-color halftone dots, but employ line-based spot color printing without halftone dots, making them impossible to replicate through color separation scanning.
It should be noted that because wine labels need to serve both decorative and anti-counterfeiting functions, not all wine labels use spot color printing. Many labels use more halftone overlays and combination printing to highlight decorative effects.
03
Process-Based Anti-Counterfeiting
Different printing equipment and process combinations can produce different anti-counterfeiting printing effects, such as peel-off backing, glue-surface printing, scratch-off coatings, registered hot stamping (cat-eye effect), colored glitter, and multi-color overprints.
Common printing methods used for liquor anti-counterfeit labels include embossing, flexography, screen printing, and digital printing. In particular, the increasingly versatile combination of flexography and digital printing equipment provides more design possibilities for liquor labels and further increases the difficulty of counterfeiting.
04
QR Code Anti-Counterfeit
QR code anti-counterfeit technology is the most widely used anti-counterfeit technology on baijiu (Chinese liquor) labels. A bottle of baijiu usually has both a box label and a bottle label, each printed with a QR code that is interconnected. Many baijiu bottle caps also have QR codes both inside and outside, serving both authenticity verification and marketing purposes. These QR codes may be single-colored or multicolored and use encryption technology to uniquely identify each product, with each item assigned a unique QR code. Multicolored QR codes incorporate more anti-counterfeit techniques, such as color information for anti-counterfeit codes and material characteristic information, achieving triple or even multiple layers of anti-counterfeiting, making the labels much harder to forge or copy.
05RFID & NFC Anti-Counterfeiting
Although RFID and NFC are both classified as radio frequency tags, there are still differences between them. RFID is essentially an identification technology, while NFC is a communication technology; RFID can only achieve information reading and verification, whereas NFC technology can enable information exchange; NFC tags can be read by smartphones, tablets, etc., while RFID tags must be read by specialized readers.
Baijiu labels often use NFC technology, allowing any NFC-enabled phone to read them at any time, which is very convenient. Some baijiu labels even use both NFC and QR code technology simultaneously, which can effectively verify certain product information. This is not only convenient but also provides multiple layers of anti-counterfeiting protection.