Jones was proud to receive the CPES2018 Commercialization Award from the intelliFLEX Innovation Alliance at its annual CPES Innovation Awards on May 24. The award recognizes us for breakthrough work integrating near-field communication (NFC) tags into folding cartons on our high-speed production lines.

“Manually applying NFC tags to cartons is easy,” says James Lee, Director, Innovation Solutions Group at Jones. “The challenge comes with scaling up for integrated mass production. Our development journey spanned over four years and saw us execute multiple exhaustive trials with various tag and carton iterations before creating a series of market-ready solutions.”

Working with supply chain partners, Jones successfully modified its processes and packaging lines to not only apply NFC tags at high speed, but also scan, read and store data to validate individual tags, ensure product integrity and automatically sort faulty tags. We can now create functional NFC-enabled paperboard packaging at a rate of 15,000 units per hour.

“From managing medication usage, to ensuring product freshness and finding better ways to manage a supply chain, the need to add intelligence and functionality to packaging is becoming more widespread,” says Peter Kallai, President and CEO of intelliFLEX. “Jones is an outstanding example of an established company that recognizes the need to invest in new technologies and change its business model to better serve this evolving market space.”

“We’re proud to be recognized by intelliFLEX, whom we applaud for their visionary work in bringing together ecosystems to drive market adoption of intelligent print applications,” adds Chris Jones Harris, Principal, Corporate Development at Jones. “Our own work has led to a number of new and exciting application projects serving different markets – from medical device to fitness and consumer health. Importantly, the strong support of our supply chain partners has been pivotal to our achievements.”

Next up, James will share more details on the Jones intelligent packaging development journey during sessions at the following events:

  • “Scaling intelligent packaging production on industry standard manufacturing equipment” at the Active & Intelligent Packaging Summit in Jersey City, NJ, which takes place June 4 and 5
  • “Smart and intelligent packaging” at ESKOWorld in San Antonio, TX, which takes place from June 5 to 7

If you’re interested in learning more about intelligent packaging technology, please don’t hesitate to contact us.