In India, each state has the power to control and regulate its own liquor trade. Given that the country comprises 29 states and seven union territories, each with their own set of laws, this presents a major challenge for the alcoholic beverage industry – a challenge that is further exacerbated by the limitations placed on the movement of alcohol between states.

This short series on emerging technologies was a result of presentations made at the Tax Stamp & Traceability Forum™ (TSTF), in May 2022. This final article in the series picks up on one theme not yet covered – the topic of substrates. But first we should consider why this debate should be defined as an emerging technology.

This short series on emerging technologies has covered a number of topics over previous months. It seems fitting as we commence 2023 to now consider the topic of sustainability, a ‘trending’ theme through recent years but one that I see having an increasing impact on our market sector.

In this series on emerging technologies, it has been notable how many of these technologies featured strongly at TSTF 2022. In this respect, however, warehouse automation is an interesting exception in that it hardly featured at that meeting.

While direct marking could be considered as an opportunity for traceability solutions, it could also be viewed as a threat to physical tax stamps.

Polyart Group, a supplier of film and paper substrates for the specialty label market, and EDGYN, a security solutions specialist, have announced a partnership for the Asia Pacific region.

While the principal method of applying unique identifiers and other variable information to a tax or authentication label is via digital printing, some labels carry that information in a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag.

The ability to link a physical object such as a stamp, label, or direct mark into the digital space, through mobile devices such as a smartphone, is an area of great current interest. A key question to consider is how this physical/digital link may change so we can ensure our technologies keep pace with these changes.

At the Tax Stamp & Traceability Forum™ in May 2022, I presented a paper on the emerging technologies that I believe will have significant impact on the tax stamp business sector. From this came an article in Tax Stamp & Traceability News™ in June summarising the threats and opportunities from these. The aim of this article is to take a deeper look into one of these technologies – digital printing.

In the July 2022 issue of Tax Stamp & Traceability News™, Dr Marietta Ulrich-Horn of Securikett stated that her company had always maintained a strong focus on tamper-evident solutions for tax stamps, because if a genuine stamp can be transferred to another product for reuse, it’s as if that stamp were actually a fake, whatever the number of security features it was carrying.