Think Laos, November 2024 — tourists died after drinking methanol-laced “vodka”. Similar tragedies have hit Turkey, the Czech Republic and Russia. These aren’t one-offs; they’re the predictable outcome of weak controls and opaque supply chains.
This is why brand protection isn’t a “nice to have”. It’s a duty of care.
What helps? A joined-up approach that makes counterfeiting hard, detection fast, and trust easy:
Design out risk in logistics. The TAPA APAC Brand Protection Standard (BPS) gives brand owners and LSPs a common playbook: known/approved carriers, risk assessments (including insider threats), and real intelligence sharing.
Make products verifiable, end-to-end. Tamper-aware packaging + unique digital identities let anyone in the chain confirm authenticity in seconds.
Close the last mile. Store staff and consumers should be able to check — quickly, privately, reliably — before a product is poured or sold.
At Bluemet, we help brands put this into practice:
Demetallised smart labels engineered for high-volume, cost-effective deployments; RFID-ready for item-level traceability; and built to integrate with standards-led programmes like TAPA BPS.
The result? A supply chain that’s harder to infiltrate and easier to trust.
If you’re responsible for alcohol or other high-risk categories, now is the time to pressure-test your controls. Let’s make “authentic” provable — not a promise.
