For decades, the standard way to apply unique codes to FMCG packs has been to send the artwork to a packaging supplier and pay them to print the codes during the production run. That model is still in widespread use today, and it carries a few well-known limitations.
The headline cost
Packaging suppliers typically charge between £3,000 and £5,000 per million coded packs — a publicly-known industry rate range. For a programme that runs 50 million coded packs a year, that’s £150,000 to £250,000 in print fees alone, before any of the validation, security or marketing infrastructure that turns those codes into a campaign.
And critically, this fee is charged on every coded pack, whether or not those codes ever form part of a live promotion. A campaign that under-runs — or that needs to be cancelled because the timing doesn’t work — carries the full print bill regardless.
What changes with in-factory
Hive IP’s ACG (Automated Code Generator) is a small device that plugs into the existing Best Before Date printer on each production line. When the BBD printer requests a code, the ACG generates a unique, non-sequential code on the fly and transmits it to the printer, which prints it alongside the BBD on the outside of the pack.
Three things change:
- The hardware is supplied at no charge. No capital cost, no licence per unit, no ongoing rental fee for the unit itself.
- The codes themselves cost nothing to print. Whatever your annual production volume, every pack can carry a code with no marginal print fee.
- Billing is on the codes covered by an active campaign. You pay only on the codes that are in market during a live promotional window — at a per-million rate that’s a fraction of what the legacy supplier route charges.
A worked example. A brand produces 120 million packs per year, with every pack carrying a code (10 million per month). They run a single 2-month promotion. The codes on the 20 million packs in market during those 2 months are billed. The remaining 100 million coded packs that year cost nothing. Run a second 2-month promotion later in the year and you’d pay on a further 20 million — total billed: 40 million from a 120 million annual production.
Why the savings compound
Once the hardware is in place and the line is running, the marginal cost of running another campaign through the same set-up is much lower than it would be on the legacy model. A second campaign in the same year — or a third, or a fourth — only incurs the usage fee on the codes covered by that campaign window. The set-up cost is sunk. Customers running multiple promotions per year typically save 78% or more against the legacy supplier route, with deeper savings reached by brands that run high-volume programmes consistently.
The hidden cost of the legacy approach
The cash savings are the headline, but they aren’t the whole story. The legacy approach also costs in two less obvious ways:
- Time. The artwork-to-shelf cycle for a unique-coded run takes months. Missed sponsorship moments, missed sport, missed seasonal opportunities — all of which have a real commercial cost that doesn’t appear on the print invoice.
- Optionality. Because every print run is committed in advance, marketing teams plan campaigns around the print cycle rather than around opportunities. The number of campaigns a brand runs per year is limited by the operational tax of running them, not by the marketing imagination.
The takeaway
Cost is the most legible way to compare in-factory and packaging-supplier print, and the in-factory case wins on cost cleanly. But the operational and strategic upside — days-not-months campaign launches, optionality on what to run and when — is often the bigger long-run prize. Read the full case for in-factory printing →