Six major Belgian tobacco manufacturers are working with Zetes to make their supply chain compliant with the revised Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) and fight illicit trade.

“We are proud to be at the forefront of driving security and integrity in the European supply chains across industry. Supporting tobacco manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers to eliminate the illicit supply of tobacco is the next chapter for us,” said Olivier Frère, Traceability Expert at Zetes.

The revised TPD (2014/40/EU), which will come into force on 20 May 2019, concerns the manufacturing, packaging, and sale of tobacco-related products. The aim is to fight illicit trade to protect public health and ensure taxes are collected properly by making the complete traceability of tobacco products mandatory. To comply with the new legislation, six Belgian tobacco producers – CTS, Flandria, Nollet, Notebaert, Stubbe, and Twist Tobacco – selected Zetes to ensure the traceability of their products across their supply chain.

The TPD makes it mandatory for producers of tobacco products to mark each product with a unique identification code (serialisation) and store these identifiers in a private repository connected to a European repository. Other economic operators (wholesalers, distributors, third party logistics service providers and retailers) must capture and register the movements of these packages along the supply chain and send the relevant information to a European Router. The data will then be available to the public authorities of the EU countries and the European Commission in the European repository, making it easier to check the legitimacy of a product.

“Zetes’ expertise in the field of serialisation and traceability is a plus when it comes to implementing compliance projects such as this one. We are now confident that our business will conform to the new aspects of the legislation,” added Cédric Santelé, CEO at CTS Tobacco.

To support this process, economic operators will need to review their processes and implement a compliant technology solution. For manufacturers, Zetes TPD compliant solutions provide packaging and product identification, required for the serialisation and aggregation process, and traceability (data processing in a central repository).

For wholesalers, distributors and retailers there is a need for a TPD compliant solution to capture and share the unique identification codes together with the specific sales data to identify the transaction and who it was for.