Traceability Weekly™ | PPMA Shows Where Product Identification Is Heading | 25 September 2026

There are weeks when the direction of this market is easier to see than others. This was one of them.

The PPMA Show at Birmingham’s NEC brought processing and packaging technology together from 22–24 September, with coding and marking, labelling, machine vision, inspection, robotics and packaging machinery operating within the same exhibition. Videojet, for example, wasn’t only demonstrating equipment on its own stand; its technology was running within OEM partner machinery around the show, illustrating the integration challenge manufacturers increasingly face when identification has to operate as part of the wider packaging line.

At almost exactly the same time, three developments elsewhere in the market reinforced the same point. Markem-Imaje launched enterprise software for managing GS1 Digital Link QR codes, Cognex introduced a new AI-assisted semiconductor identification platform, and GS1’s global Industry & Standards Event put trusted product identity, 2D migration, Digital Product Passports and interoperability at the centre of its agenda.

Taken together, this was less a week of individual product launches than a useful snapshot of where traceability is heading. Mark → Label → Verify → Inspect → Package remains the physical sequence. Increasingly, however, every stage sits on top of a digital layer connecting identity, product data, inspection and production events.

Markem-Imaje moves further beyond the printer

Perhaps the most strategically important launch came from Markem-Imaje.

On 23 September, the company launched CoLOS 2D Activate and CoLOS 2D Engage, two enterprise SaaS products aimed at manufacturers preparing for the transition towards GS1-powered 2D codes and connected packaging.

Markem-Imaje’s CoLOS 2D announcement⁠

This is a material development from the earlier CoLOS 2D story rather than a repeat of it. The new products move specifically into the creation, organisation, activation and management of static and dynamic GS1 Digital Link QR codes across CPG and FMCG portfolios. Markem-Imaje is also wrapping consulting around the technology to assess manufacturers’ production environments, coding processes and operational readiness.

That is significant because it shows where the commercial boundary of coding and marking is moving.

For decades, much of the value proposition centred on getting reliable variable information onto a product at production speed: batch, lot, date, serial number, barcode. The printer was the critical technology.

Connected packaging creates a larger problem. The manufacturer still has to print the code correctly, but it must also decide which identifier the product carries, what data sits behind it, where that information is maintained, how a Digital Link resolves, whether the destination changes according to context and how thousands or millions of identifiers are governed across products, factories and markets.

The proposition therefore starts to move from printing information towards managing product identity.

That distinction matters for the coding and marking industry. The physical printer remains essential, but software, data architecture and integration can become an increasingly important part of the customer relationship. It also creates a natural overlap between companies historically associated with coding equipment and businesses operating in serialisation, product-data management and traceability software.

GS1 Sunrise 2027 remains an industry transition ambition rather than legislation, but developments like this show that suppliers are already commercialising the infrastructure around it. For manufacturers, the important lesson remains that changing the barcode is the easy part. The larger project sits behind it: product data, identifiers, printing, verification, digital destinations and governance all have to agree.

Cognex brings AI into one of manufacturing’s least forgiving identification applications

If Markem-Imaje demonstrates how far identification can extend beyond the physical code, this week’s launch from Cognex demonstrates why reading that physical identity reliably still matters.

Cognex launched its In-Sight 1750 Series on 23 September for wafer and panel identification in semiconductor manufacturing. It combines AI-assisted reading, advanced imaging and purpose-built illumination to handle difficult marks and challenging substrates, including degraded identifiers that can otherwise require operator intervention.

Cognex In-Sight 1750 announcement⁠

Wafer identification is an unusually good example of traceability being operational infrastructure rather than an administrative record. Semiconductor manufacturing can involve hundreds of process steps. Losing reliable identity at one of those stages can interrupt automated production, require manual intervention and weaken the manufacturing history attached to a high-value wafer.

Cognex has therefore designed the 1750 not simply around read performance but around maintaining throughput. Existing In-Sight 1740 jobs can be converted to the new platform, setup is browser-based, and built-in read logging creates a record that can support process and quality control.

This also illustrates the continuing convergence between DPM, identification and machine vision. A permanent mark has little traceability value if downstream systems cannot read it reliably; a reader becomes more valuable when it can cope with real manufacturing variation rather than ideal laboratory conditions.

AI is particularly interesting here because it is being applied to one of the most practical problems in industrial traceability: keeping identity intact when the physical mark or surface is difficult.

Last week’s P&G/Siemens story showed AI vision becoming scalable quality infrastructure. Cognex’s launch extends the theme into identification itself. In both cases, AI is useful not because it replaces industrial engineering, but because it helps automation cope with variation that traditionally creates exceptions and operator intervention.

PPMA 2026: the interesting story was integration

The temptation after a major exhibition is to produce a long list of machines that appeared on stands. That isn’t particularly useful.

The more important signal from PPMA Show 2026 was how difficult it is becoming to separate the individual technologies that make up a modern packaging line.

Videojet explicitly used the show to demonstrate coding equipment both on its own stand and integrated into OEM partner machinery around the exhibition. Its PPMA proposition covered high-speed inkjet, laser coding and labelling with traceability and changing regulatory requirements forming part of the same conversation.

A particularly relevant real-world example came from Tekpak Automation.

At PPMA, Tekpak highlighted a robotic pharmaceutical packaging system developed for a UK manufacturer of transdermal patches. The system combines continuous machine vision, inspection, active tracking and four Delta robots to inspect, verify, pick and package patches at speeds of up to 1,600 per minute. The deployed QC-Sleever has increased throughput by more than 30%, reduced the reject rate to below 1%, cut the required labour by 12 operators per shift and occupies over 30% less floor space than the conventional multi-machine approach it replaces.

Those figures make the application more useful than another exhibition demonstration. It shows what happens when inspection and packaging are engineered as one process.

The camera isn’t an accessory sitting beside the packaging machine. It is making decisions the automation depends upon. Product tracking has to persist while items move at high speed. Inspection results determine what happens physically next. Robotics then act on those decisions.

That is precisely where Verify → Inspect → Package stops being a marketing sequence and becomes a control architecture.

It also explains why PPMA matters to this particular niche. Coding companies, vision specialists, robotics businesses, labelling suppliers and packaging OEMs may still describe themselves as separate sectors, but their technology increasingly has to work on the same line, against the same product identity and often with the same production data.

For manufacturers, integration capability can therefore matter as much as the specification of any individual machine.

GS1 puts trusted identity behind the physical line

While PPMA demonstrated the physical integration happening on factory floors, the GS1 Industry & Standards Event 2026, held virtually from 21–24 September, dealt with much of the information architecture underneath it.

More than 1,250 participants from over 85 countries were expected, with the programme centred on trusted identification, regulatory compliance, global migration to 2D, Digital Product Passports, interoperability and data sharing.

GS1 Industry & Standards Event 2026⁠

The combination of subjects is more interesting than the event itself.

GS1 2D, DPP and traceability are sometimes discussed as separate programmes. Operationally, they increasingly depend on the same foundations: a persistent identifier, reliable master data, a physical data carrier and systems capable of exchanging information consistently.

The Digital Product Passport makes that particularly clear. Under the EU’s ESPR framework, the passport is connected through a data carrier to a persistent unique product identifier, with information intended to be machine-readable, structured and interoperable. Product-specific requirements will depend on future delegated acts, so manufacturers should be wary of suppliers pretending every detail is already settled.

But the architecture is already clear enough to matter.

A product increasingly needs a trustworthy relationship between what physically exists and what the digital system says exists.

That brings the standards conversation directly back to the factory floor. Someone still has to generate the identifier, put it onto the product or packaging, verify it, associate it with the right information and preserve that relationship as the product moves.

The digital and physical sides of traceability are becoming increasingly difficult to separate.

Regulatory & Standards Watch

The immediate UK deadline remains 1 October 2026, when Vaping Products Duty and the Vaping Duty Stamps Scheme begin.

For affected manufacturers, this is now an execution issue rather than a future regulatory watch item. The digital-stamp architecture introduces authentication and traceability into the supply chain, while aggregation allows individually stamped units to be grouped beneath higher-level identifiers. The practical challenge is making stamp application, scanning, aggregation and record keeping work reliably at production and logistics speed.

The wider regulatory direction is equally important. Digital Product Passports continue to push manufacturers towards structured product information linked to physical identifiers, while GS1’s work this week reinforces the importance of interoperable identity rather than proprietary islands of data.

There was also an interesting international pharmaceutical signal this week. Pakistan’s Drug Regulatory Information System now explicitly supports submissions covering pharmaceutical products, batches, barcodes and serials, reflecting the continuing global spread of medicine-level identification and traceability infrastructure. The direction is familiar from established pharmaceutical serialisation regimes: regulation increasingly turns identification from something printed on the pack into something that must correspond with a digital record.

For technology suppliers, these regimes do not simply create demand for printers. They create demand across serialisation software, vision, verification, aggregation, line integration and data management.

What the week tells us

There is a useful contrast between what happened in Birmingham and what happened elsewhere this week.

PPMA showed the physical factory: printers integrated into packaging machinery, cameras inspecting products, robots acting on inspection decisions and EoL systems moving identified products downstream.

Markem-Imaje and GS1 showed the information architecture behind that factory: unique identifiers, Digital Link, structured data, interoperability and the systems needed to maintain product identity beyond the production line.

Cognex sat almost perfectly between the two, using machine vision and AI to make sure a physical mark remains reliably connected to a manufacturing record.

That is why the market increasingly makes sense as one ecosystem.

Mark → Label → Verify → Inspect → Package describes what happens physically.

Behind it sits another process:

Identify → Connect → Verify → Record → Act.

Neither works particularly well without the other.

For manufacturers, that means equipment purchasing decisions increasingly need to consider integration and data architecture earlier. For OEMs and integrators, it means the commercial opportunity extends beyond individual machines towards connected production problems.

And for talent, it reinforces a trend that has become increasingly visible through these weekly developments. Deep specialists remain essential, but some of the hardest people to replace are those who understand the interfaces: the vision engineer who understands traceability, the coding specialist who understands GS1 data, the automation engineer who understands inspection, or the technical salesperson who can discuss both the physical line and the software architecture behind it.

That crossover is where much of the complexity — and increasingly much of the value — now sits.

Traceability Weekly™ is produced by RoboEdge Talent, covering the companies, technologies, regulation, standards and specialist talent shaping global Product Identification, Traceability & End-of-Line Automation.