Digital Printing to the Rescue
US
The idiom of “The devil is in the details” very much applies to the major trends in the modernization of tea logistics from bush to cup. In particular, the phasing of the comprehensive Federal Food Safety Modernization ACT (FSMA) has a little imp lurking.
FSMA sets policies and rules aimed at two priorities: prevention and accountability. Prevention aims at anticipating safety problems early instead of having to firefight after the event. It requires importers to define formal plans for Hazard Analysis and Risk-Based Preventive Controls (HARPC). Accountability begins with know your supplier and verify their safety, reliability, and authenticity of their products. Science-based testing, records access, and many compliance processes support the FSMA aim at reducing the 48 million cases of Americans getting sick and 130,00 hospital annual from unsafe food.
That’s the grand scheme. Here’s the devil: Printing. The question that is easy for any player in the tea market is “What is food?” Section 1o3 of FSMA (FFDCA Section 418) states that it includes packaging. That means that the tea bags, box, tin, or air—freighted parcel from China have to conform to HARPC and ensure end-to-end accountability.
The key here is digital printing. This is routine in home and small business. It is the direct printing of an image or text on demand, using inkjet or laser. It is more expensive than the offset printing that is cheaper for handling large volumes of output: tea bag labels, boxes, etc.
Those are largely fixed in format and stable in content. The barcode is the permanent product identifier and doesn’t change by the batch. When the marketing or ingredient information, new printing plates are made and a new run begun. Plates take time to set up. But they offer lower cost per output than digital printing and higher choices of resolution. Digital printing is best suited to small runs and does not require set up. It adds many challenges in types of ink – solvent, pigment – and substrate requirements – paper, fiber, metal.
The core of FSMA is that all information must be timely, accessible and traceable. Much of this can be accommodated through wireless readers (RFID), blockchain (the emerging networks for recoding and tracking very detail in the history of a transaction) but in more and more instances, the printed information must be at a level of specificity than is time- and context-dependent: batch identification, testing and authentication indicators, etc.
Tea firms will need to address the transition from offset to digital. They have plenty of options but one detail – an extra devil – is who leads it? The IT department has the technical expertise but not the knowledge of materials, design, and presentation while the Marketing Function is likely to overlook many of the cost, technology and vendor/contracting issues.
One point is clear: tea companies will have to make digital printing a core part of their plans for supply chain integration and exploitation of the many business benefits skilled implementation of FSMA can bring them.