ROCHESTER, N.Y. - Today the Eastman Kodak Company Brand Protection Solutions unit and New York Label & Box Works announced a partnership to provide advanced brand protection capabilities.  The two companies can help brands combat counterfeiters and diverters with invisible serialization and other overt, covert and ultra-covert features that provide a layered set of protections.

The increase of global counterfeiting and product diversion has created a need for brand owners to increase the level of sophistication of the brand protection measures they build into their packaging. NY Label has fully-integrated state-of-the-art variable data print technology into their flexographic printing process so that they can provide both overt and covert serialization.  The covert codes can be hidden in ways that make them hard to find, hard to remove, and, in some cases, illegal to remove.

“NY Label is a great partner for Kodak because of their experience and strong process knowledge” said Richard Gammons, Product Manager for Kodak Brand Protection Solutions.  “In a remarkably short period of time, the two companies have equipped NY Label with the ability to offer multiple brand protection features -- some of which required new equipment and processes that are unfamiliar to the vast majority of print providers.”

Kodak’s TRACELESS family of products are systems that include a material component  that is added to the label and a reader/viewer that is available only from Kodak.  Not all print suppliers have the capability to incorporate all these technologies into their offerings.

"The Kodak solution is an important improvement over what we had the capability to provide to our customers previously" said Mike Masotti, Director of Product Innovation at NY Label, "In accordance with a core principle of our quality philosophy – continuous improvement, we want to be proactive and stay ahead of the diverters; what we previously offered was very robust and effective, but with the additional software, hardware and ink technologies from Kodak, we can now say to our customers that we can truly offer the most 'bullet-proof' Brand Protection label in the industry."

The New York Label team was delighted by the thorough technical support from the engineers, chemists, and scientists from Kodak's Brand Protection team.

“The first major project that was printed utilizing the Traceless AD technology, for a global luxury cosmetic company, was produced without any additional downtime,” said Craig Streibel, senior press operator for New York Label. “The Traceless AD ink performed even better than the generic security ink that he has been running for three plus years.”