The global pharmaceutical labelling market size reached 5.67 Billion USD in 2022 and is expected to reach $8.01 Billion by 2028. One of the key factors behind this surge is the rising demand for pharmaceutical products, partly driven by the growing elderly population. It’s simple logic: more people requiring more medicine leads to a greater need for labels. However, an ageing population is likely just one straightforward factor contributing to the steady growth in pharma labelling.
While the worldwide supply chain gets more interconnected, expansive and diverse, novel and highly sophisticated formulations stream through the approval pipeline, onto the production floor and into the market. Meanwhile, regulations continue to be adopted, adapted and strengthened across various regions, often in disparate, inconsistent fashions.
New markets, new drugs and new rules combine to make the manufacturing and packaging processes exponentially more intricate, as the amount of information a medicine must communicate to pharmacists and end users expands despite limited packaging print space. Considering this, it’s no wonder that one of the niches helping to drive pharma labelling’s global growth is a solution that addresses each of these issues with room to spare: Extended Content Labels (ECLs) or booklet labels as we call them!
Utilized in various facets of pharmaceutical packaging, they can range from as few as two pages to full-fledged booklets of up to 60 pages, which are more typically used for clinical trials and prescription drug packaging. The overarching benefit of ECLs is space consolidation.
You can do a lot with a little, as flip book and fold-out styles allow print space to be multiplied several times over while taking up a little more total space than the surface of an ordinary label. The result is ample room for a lengthy list of mounting mandatory information, including:
- Warnings and directives that comply with regulatory guidelines, often across multiple nations or trade regions.
- Serialization and traceability requirements.
- Different languages for both international and domestic customers. For example, Canada needs labels in English and French, while in the US, Spanish is quickly becoming an unofficial second national language.
- Specific, detailed instructions. More and more prescription pharmaceuticals require strict adherence regimens, which in turn necessitate detailed printed instructions for doctors, pharmacists, and end users. Relatedly, clinical trials often need tight control, another condition that lends itself to more labelling content rather than less.
Much like the pharma landscape at large, issues surrounding ECLs can also be quite complex, with decisions that impact a product’s journey along the supply chain and effectiveness for the end user. They are a solution to a conundrum. Even in an eco-conscious, message-cluttered landscape where less is more, in reality, pharma companies know that more is more.
Flexibility, reliability, accuracy, and agility are just some of the qualities pharmaceutical companies look for in a label converter, especially those that print prescription medication packaging. They must also be up-to-speed on the latest Food and Drug Administration requirements and offer a wide portfolio of products to serve the industry’s rapidly changing needs.
