Why Are U.S. Pharma Companies Using Coding and Marking Systems?

The U.S. is one of the largest producers of pharmaceutical products and also the country with among the most-stringent regulations implemented on this industry. As per the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in 2019, the country was home to 28% of all the factories in the world producing active pharmaceutical ingredients. The FDA strictly regulates the research and development (R&D), production, clinical trials, marketing, and sale of pharmaceutical products. Companies are mandated to provide all the essential details of the drugs, including their key ingredients, manufacturing and expiry dates, batch number, and manufacturer information, on the packaging.

Therefore, the U.S. coding and marking systems market has a bright future ahead, as per P&S Intelligence, as all the details on pharmaceutical packaging are printed by these machines. Similarly, the country is also home to a huge food and beverage industry, which is another major user of these machines. Coding and marking systems are widely used on the primary and secondary packaging of canned food items, fresh produce, sauces, spices, and condiments; baked goods and confectionary, meats, seafood, and poultry; juices, soft drinks, liquors, and all other kinds of processed food and beverage items.

Another major industry in the country is automotive, with several globally operating companies having their manufacturing plants here. To track them through the production process, individual vehicle parts are extensively coded. Since auto component and final vehicle assembly plants are often far from each other, the components need to be transported across great distances. Thus, to tell genuine components from counterfeited ones, special codes and markings are printed on them. 

The same goes for pharmaceutical products, which account for a high rate of counterfeiting. Since fake pharma goods can lead to more harm than benefit, it is essential to stop them from being distributed, which can be done by identifying them by the absence of company codes and markings on their labels. Therefore, coding and marking systems not only inform the end customers of the products, but also allow their manufacturers to keep a track of them and ensure that only genuine ones are in circulation.

Moreover, the country has a thriving chop shop culture, which has been portrayed in many games and movies, the most popular being the Fast & Furious series. Such places receive stolen automobiles, strip them off, and then sell off the individual components. As a result, automakers are focusing strongly on part traceability, therefore using advanced coding and marking systems that can alter a basic code or image and modify it in order to make it difficult to be replicated. Thus, genuine auto parts, even if coming off a chop shop, can be easily identified. 

Other important end users in the U.S. coding and marking systems market are the chemical, electrical and electronics, aerospace, cosmetics and personal care, textile, and packaged consumer goods industries. The U.S. is one of the biggest fashion hubs in the world, which is why patterns by famous fashion designers are widely duplicated, and the fake clothes sold as genuine. Similarly, the U.S. receives a huge quantity of counterfeit electrical and electronic goods via its land border with Mexico and over the sea. This problem becomes even worse for critical goods, such as weapon systems, with 15% of the replacement parts bought by the U.S. being counterfeits, as per the Department of Defense (DoD).

Hence, with the strong focus of the U.S. government on ensuring the optimum functionality and safety of food and pharma products and its increasing efforts to check counterfeiting, the demand for coding and marking systems will burgeon here.