Traceability: Giving every product an authentic identity
Traceability differs from other brand protection technologies in important ways. Overt and covert technologies such as holograms, taggants, intaglio print, microtext, invisible images, and digital watermarks offer excellent solutions for authentication, but cannot distinguish individual items at a unit level and cannot carry or point to item-level data—something that is required for traceability. Examples include the ability to securely discriminate between a toner cartridge made on shift 1 versus shift 2; a melon picked by a specific crew; or where an individual package was intended to be shipped. In fact, traceability and authentication are complementary: a traceability code can benefit from being printed with copy-resistant technology, and the response to querying the code online or by cell phone can also guide the user on what authentication technology to look for. Another benefit of traceability is the opportunity to collect information from the market—and correlate that with production data. For example, how long did a product take to get to market? What condition was a product in when it reached the shelf?
