Elena Gridneva, Marketing and Insight Director at CJSC ‘Galileo Nanotech’, has commented on the news that Pharmstandard was switching to a new kind of packaging materials – metallized boards.

An opinion from a Unipack.Ru expert:

“The drug, which is sold under the Arbidol brand, has recommended itself as a high-quality product on the drug market. However, still with time, many brands, including the top quality ones, introduce certain changes to their product to improve it and/or stay in the consumer’s focus. For those products that cannot be made functionally different, such changes usually concern the packaging. Switching from ordinary to metallized boards is a positive change as, in addition to improved designed and printing qualities, metallization gives extra functional advantages like protection from UV radiation, which is especially important for pharmaceutical products.

“Several varieties of packaging materials fall into the metallized board category today. This is transfer and vacuum metallized boards, and boards laminated with metallized film. Unlike the first two options, working with the latter one involves a number of difficulties such as insufficient ink adhesion, delamination, breaks during scoring, etc. When working with laminates, printing companies often resort to additional priming of metallized surfaces to improve the ink’s adhesion. This increases the material’s cost. Vacuum metallized boards do not require additional priming as the production technology includes obligatory coating of the metallized surface. This means that the material is delivered to the printing house ready for printing. Such material keeps better during post-printing operations like creasing and folding, etc.

“We are sure that Pharmstandard’s choice of the new materials was undoubtedly correct and on trend, as the packaging’s multi-functionality is as important to the consumer as is its design. This step may increase the demand for metallized boards for packing pharmaceutical products. In this connection, it is important to say that Russia now has its own world class manufacturer whose high standards and production facilities can comply with a rise of such demand and provide the required volumes of vacuum metallized boards for Russia, the CIS countries, and Eastern Europe.”

Elena Gridneva, Marketing and Insight Director of CJSC ‘Galileo Nanotech’, for the Unipack portal.