There are many codes and symbols that have been in use for years that can be scanned for various functions. The most well-known are probably bar codes, but with the proliferation of apps available to smartphone users, the labels your company produces need to be easy to read and placed smoothly. This is especially true for bottles of wine and spirits, which require a label applicator to make sure the label stock doesn’t warp or wrinkle.
Business Insider recently reported on an app called Next Glass for smartphones that is designed to recognize beer and wine labels and let the user “grade” it based on various statistics. These include calorie content, origin and flavor, all of which are checked against the “flavor profile” of the user to determine how much they would enjoy it and whether it’s worth a purchase.
The app doesn’t take a photograph but scans the bottle itself, with the calculations happening in “real time” as the phone is held in front of the label. Still, the label needs to be easy for the phone to read, so it can compare the vintage with the information it keeps in its database.
While this app currently only works for a limited list of beverages, alcohol companies should think about the way that this software could develop and how to match those solutions in the future. To make labels with this in mind, businesses should consider a Primera system, including the AP360 label applicator, which works well with the Primera printers. The AP360 will take the label production assembly process more directly from design to the moment of placement.