中文Counterfeiting has long been treated as somebody else’s problem — a brand owner’s legal headache, a customs issue, an e-commerce platform’s takedown queue. Koenig & Bauer is betting that the printing industry itself can become the front line, and the company’s “protected at print” security concept has now won the Business Process category at the 2026 Stationers’ Innovation Excellence Awards in London, one of the graphic arts industry’s most closely watched recognition programs.
The premise behind the award-winning concept is elegantly practical: security features should be embedded in the printing process itself, not bolted on afterwards through special substrates, separate hologram lines or expensive dedicated equipment. Drawing on decades of experience in security printing for central banks — arguably the most demanding authentication environment in existence — Koenig & Bauer has assembled an integrated ecosystem for product authentication aimed at packaging, pharmaceuticals and consumer goods.
Three technologies anchor the ecosystem. Stegano embeds invisible information directly into printed images and coatings, hidden in plain sight on the very surfaces consumers and inspectors already look at. Ovjera identifies the unique microscopic structures of materials, turning the physical randomness of the substrate itself into a fingerprint that cannot be cloned. Daktylo verifies production characteristics, capturing the subtle machine signatures that distinguish a genuine production run from an unauthorized copy. All three are accessible through the company’s ava smartphone verification application, which means authentication no longer requires laboratory instruments — a phone camera is enough to confirm a product is genuine and trace its origin.
For printers, the commercial appeal is significant. The solution enables security features to be introduced into existing production workflows without requiring specialized equipment, which transforms anti-counterfeit capability from a capital expenditure decision into a service offering. Printers can pitch authenticated packaging to their brand customers as an add-on, deepening relationships and capturing value in categories — pharmaceuticals, premium spirits, cosmetics, spare parts — where counterfeit exposure is acute and regulation is tightening.
Brand owners get a different but complementary benefit set: covert protection that counterfeiters cannot easily detect or reverse-engineer, combined with batch-level traceability that supports both enforcement actions and supply-chain transparency obligations. As digital product passport requirements roll out across the European Union and serialization mandates expand globally, the ability to tie physical print to verifiable digital identity is shifting from nice-to-have to near-mandatory in several categories.
The certification layer is where the strategy becomes an industry program rather than a product line. Koenig & Bauer’s cp³ Certified Protected Print Provider program, introduced in February 2026, supports commercial printers in expanding their services into authenticated packaging production. Certified partners are already operating in the United Kingdom, Italy, India, the United States and Mexico — a geographic spread that reflects both the global nature of counterfeiting and the deliberate internationalization of the program from the start.
Julian Schubert, CEO of Koenig & Bauer Vision & Protection, drew the through-line explicitly when he noted that the company has protected currencies worldwide for decades, and that “protected at print” now extends that expertise to consumer goods, pharmaceuticals and premium products. The Stationers’ award jury evidently agreed that translating banknote-grade thinking into commercial print workflows is a genuine innovation in business process terms, not merely a repackaging of existing security printing.
The wider context makes the timing apt. Industry estimates consistently place global trade in counterfeit goods in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, with packaging-dependent categories among the hardest hit. Meanwhile, print service providers in mature markets are under sustained pressure to move up the value chain as commodity print volumes migrate to lower-cost producers. Security printing sits squarely at the intersection of those two pressures: it is defensible, technically demanding, contractually sticky, and increasingly demanded by regulators and brand owners alike.
There are, of course, execution questions ahead. Authentication ecosystems live or die by adoption density — a verification scheme is only as strong as the number of products and checkpoints enrolled. The ava app approach lowers the barrier for consumers and field inspectors, but brand education and enforcement follow-through remain the industry’s shared responsibility. Koenig & Bauer’s task now is to convert award momentum into a growing roster of certified print partners across more markets.
Still, the direction of travel is clear. The printing industry is increasingly selling trust as well as ink, and “protected at print” is one of the most complete manifestations of that shift — banknote security thinking, smartphone-era verification, and a certification program that lets ordinary commercial printers participate. For an industry searching for its next structural growth story, this is what it looks like.
For print shop owners weighing whether this matters to their business, consider how the sales conversation changes. A printer who can walk into a pharmaceutical or premium spirits brand meeting and demonstrate smartphone-verifiable authentication built into the existing print run is no longer quoting paper and ink — they are quoting risk reduction. That reframing is worth real margin, because customers judge security spending against the cost of a counterfeit recall, not against a competitor’s quote per thousand sheets. It also creates contract stickiness: once authentication data flows through your plant into a brand’s traceability system, switching suppliers means re-validating the entire chain.
The realistic caution is adoption discipline. Security schemes fail quietly when only half the supply chain enrolls, leaving counterfeiters the unverified channels to exploit. Brands and printers adopting this kind of ecosystem should plan enforcement checkpoints and consumer education from day one, not as an afterthought. Still, the industry-wide signal from the Stationers’ recognition is unmistakable: the print sector’s next export is not just packaging, it is confidence — the verifiable kind, baked into the very ink on the box.
Source: inkish.news / Koenig & Bauer, “Koenig & Bauer Wins Innovation Award for Anti-Counterfeit Technology” (Stationers’ Innovation Excellence Awards 2026).
