Compliance packaging: Tips from a contract packager

Creating compliance-prompting packaging is no easy task. Anderson Packaging uses the following practices to help its pharmaceutical customers. The need for compliance—or regimen—packaging, as well as packaging that combines two or more drugs, will be acute as the massive baby boomer generation ages and requires more prescription medications. • The package's structural design has to be intuitive, easy to open and operate. • The print needs to be large enough and offer enough visual contrast to be read. • If the package is a multipack that meters out multiple medications, its contents have to be filled in the correct sequence in the package. Failure in any of these steps could result in packaging that the patient can't read or open, or—worse—medicines being consumed in a regimen other than what the physician prescribed, or not at all. "Most of our customers use their own design agency," notes Justin Schroeder, Anderson Packaging's marketing and business development director, but with its own in-house package design team. "We can also come up with the design concept," Schroeder says.