The contract packaging market, like other segments of the outsourcing industry, is guided by the larger forces impacting pharma and biopharma. Whether its mergers and acquisitions, the patent cliff, or regulatory hurdles, contract packagers must adapt their business strategy in order to thrive through new product offerings, consolidation, technology investment or forming new client-bases as well as pushing into new geographic regions.

For our annual focus on packaging trends, Contract Pharma spoke with some of the leading contract packagers operating in the market today to get some insight into this fast-changing environment. Beginning on page 40 business leaders from Packaging Coordinators Inc., Pharma Packaging Solutions, Reed-Lane, Pharma Tech Industries, Bosch Packaging Technology, and Aphena Pharma Solutions sound off on the latest market trends, challenges and opportunities.

By all indications the contract packaging market should continue along its current growth cycle that is estimated to be increasing 5-8% a year.

Perhaps the major trend impacting packagers, along with the entire pharmaceutical business supply chain, is serialization. It is altering existing operations models, systems and markets.

With the 2017 DSCSA deadline looming, companies should realize the extensive and comprehensive transformation serialization involves. After all, upgrading pharmaceutical factories that will have to mark medicine packages with individual, traceable barcodes is not an easy, or cheap, undertaking.

However, while a daunting task, serialization implementation may be the largest opportunity for growth. The major challenge to that growth could be the limited number of vendors available to provide the serialization solutions, making it more difficult for everyone to be ready for 2017.

Delving deeper into the topic for this issue is one such provider in the market. On page 50 Tracelink’s Brian Daleiden lays out practical advice and solutions to help your company get up to speed. The article reviews learnings from initial serialization deployments and highlights key actions that CMO and CPO supply partners should be taking today to help prepare them for the upcoming rush of track and trace regulations.

After all, by the end of 2018, he says over forty countries representing over 75% of the world’s drug supply will be under one or more laws governing unique product identity, supply chain traceability, verification and government reporting.

So, if your company hasn’t begun the process of implementing a serialization strategy, this article is a good place to start. There is still time to get ahead of the curve, but not much.



Tim Wright, Editor
twright@rodmanmedia.com