Why vaccine and pharmaceutical labelling is critical

There’s never been such a spotlight on the pharmaceutical industry. Vaccines and drug treatments are daily headline news and speed of production is quite literally a case of life or death. The ability to accurately label vaccines is mission critical, but with unpredictable supply chain environments, label production is increasingly complex.

Regulation changes pose a challenge

One of the many challenges for pharmaceutical labelling is frequent changes in regulations. More and more critical health and safety information is required to be crammed onto small-sized labels. By law, the information must be legible and accurate — the smallest error or smudge that results in a barcode or text that can’t be clearly read will result in a product recall. This is financially costly but can also have serious consequences when it comes to vaccine production.

Pre-printed label stock is far from ideal

Many companies in the industry traditionally buy pre-printed label media and run it through black and white thermal printers to add the variable information. This is challenging for a few reasons: 

1.     Poor quality printing

Thermal transfer technology has a limited print resolution, which means that smaller fonts may end up not being legible. At the same time, creases in the ribbon used by those printers could lead to misprints.

2.     Speed and errors

Different products require different size of labels, which means having to purchase several types of pre-printed stock. Having to manually select the correct pre-printed labels for each product slows down the process and opens it up to errors.

3.     Wasted label stock

When regulations or company branding changes, pre-printed label stock becomes obsolete and ends up going to waste.

Printing in-house, on-demand is the solution

Printing your own labels in-house and on-demand means that companies and laboratories have full control and flexibility when labels need to be changed. It’s easy to manage any changes, from the size of the label, to branding and colour-coding, or even if regulation changes mean redesigning the label completely.

Epson ColorWorks full colour label printers use inkjet technology, which, unlike thermal transfer technology, can produce a print resolution up to 1200 x 1200 dpi. This means that small fonts and special characters can be printed in super fine detail, which increases their accuracy.

Printing on-demand can help to streamline and automate the labelling process by minimising manual intervention and reducing human error. And because you print what you need, when you need it, there’s less wastage and held stock, which saves money too.

Click here for further information and to see what our customers have to say about our pharmaceutical solutions: www.epson.eu/pharma.