Laws Demand More Label Information

European label printing group Skanem has claimed that it is set to 'throw the book' at the Seventh Amendment!

European label printing group Skanem has claimed that it is set to 'throw the book' at the Seventh Amendment! In a little less then a year from now, labelling legislation will demand that much more information on contents is provided on health and beauty products as the so-called Seventh Amendment to those laws come into force.

Skanem said it represents a tremendous challenge to label designers who have to incorporate the additional information in what can be very restrictive spaces - as small as 11mm on items such as on lipsticks.

The company's answer is to turn the label into a book with several pages that the consumer can peel back to obtain the information without spoiling its aesthetic appeal.

David Harrisson, Skanem's pan-European sales director, said: "This peel-and-read label is going to be the answer to the demands of the Seventh Amendment.

We first developed it as a means of providing multi-lingual information for products that sell in markets across Europe.

From next March, makers of health and beauty products, for example, will have to provide a more detailed list of ingredients on their labels and the only way to do that sensibly, so that it can be easily read, will be to adopt our peel-and-read labels which are, in effect, small books." He added that the information could be provided on a number of pages - typically three or five - to satisfy the Seventh Amendment requirements and cope with the challenges of presenting it in several European languages.

The labels are being produced at Skanem's Cardiff (Wales), Hobro (Denmark) and Willich (Germany) plants in order to provide a fast and efficient service to producers throughout the whole of Europe added Skanem.

By using special substrates and adhesives, the labels are laminated in such a way that consumers can easily peel back the pages.

"The labels are already proving very popular across a whole range of products -from wine bottles to paint cans - but, with the advent of the Seventh Amendment, demand for them is going to explode.

We can produce them in any size or shape.

Our smallest is just 11mm in diameter - about the size of a little finger nail - which is attached to the base of lipstick containers," said Harrison.

"The recent expansion of the European Union has introduced the need to provide label information in many more languages and is also driving the demand for our peel-and-read labels.

Although these labels are obviously a little more expensive to produce, by being able to accommodate a variety of languages they reduce the need for a number of smaller printing runs and constant change-overs on the packaging lines and consequently work out to be a better deal," he added.

He commented that some of the labels Skanem has made contain consumer information in 16 languages, which eliminates the need for 16 different labels added.

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