Crane and Essentra Partner for Next Generation Security Features

Crane Currency and Essentra Packaging have announced a strategic partnership to develop a range of next generation security features for the pharmaceutical and beauty packaging industry.

Crane Currency is one the banknote industry’s leading integrated papermakers and printers. It also provides security features, notably threads and surface applied features based on micro-optics, under the name MOTION®. It was acquired by the industrial engineering conglomerate Crane Co in 2018, and in 2019 launched a new business unit – Crane Authentication.

UK-based Essentra Packaging specialises in secondary packaging for the pharma and healthcare industries, among others, producing cartons, leaflets, self-adhesive labels and printed foils used for blister packs. It also has a photo ID card business, and produces security tear tapes and shrink sleeves, holograms and tamper evident labels, along with authentication technologies including proprietary colour shift inks and taggants. With sales of £363 million, it is the largest business unit within the £897 million turnover parent company Essentra.

According to Kamal Taneja, Managing Director of Essentra Packaging, ‘our strategy is to offer next generation packaging, label and leaflet solutions driving value for our customers. This agreement with Crane is a perfect illustration of this strategy, enabling us to include the leading anti-counterfeiting micro-optic technology in our products and offer the best solution to our customers’.

Crane Currency’s micro-optics technology utilises micro lenses to project a magnified version of microscopic finely printed images, causing them to appear hundreds of times larger than their actual size. The effect is one of dramatic movement of the magnified, 3D, images in a direction perpendicular to the angle of tilt – a counter-intuitive effect that is both easy to recognise and visually engaging.

Crane Authentication’s security label portfolio is based on a version of the micro- optics technology which, it says, offers ‘superior 3D effects with unsurpassed detail and depth’, along with independent movement across multiple axes of tilt. The labels support security inks as well as track and trace and taggants, and are available with heat-disruptable and tamper- evident constructions.

Crane, perhaps best known for the MOTION thread in the $100 bill, already has brand protection contracts in the computer consumables and licencing markets. It is believed that this is its first foray into the pharmaceutical and beauty sectors.

The announcement of the partnership comes at a time when the future of both companies is under the spotlight.

At the end of last year, the Essentra group, formerly known as Filtrona, announced a strategic review of the Packaging division, with a view to selling or spinning it out, and exiting the packaging market (see AN December 2021). It will then focus on the two remaining parts of the business – industrial components and filters for the tobacco industry.

Last month, meanwhile, Crane Co announced its intention to split the company into two independent, publicly traded companies. The Aerospace & Electronics and Process Flow Technologies businesses will retain the name Crane Co, while the Payment & Merchandising Technologies business (where Crane Currency sits) will become Crane NXT.

According to Crane, after the separation Crane NXT, which will have sales of c. $1.4 billion, will be positioned to drive earnings growth through continued investment in the business and value-enhancing bolton acquisitions.

Is it a stretch, therefore, to imagine that the strategic partnership between Essentra Packaging and Crane Currency is a forerunner to closer alignment in the future?

Sealing the deal with a handshake are Kamal Taneja, Managing Director of Essentra Packaging (left) and Sam Keayes, President of Crane Currency (right).