The Authentic Vision Unique Tag is awarded for its innovative features on counterfeiting and customer communication for the wine industry.

The Innovation + Quality conference is a one-of-a-kind forum for ultra-premium wineries that took place March 2nd, 2017, at Charles Krug Winery in St Helena CA (Napa County), hosted by Wine Business Monthly. In addition to the one-day event with educational sessions and an exhibit hall, very innovative products which are helping to advance the industry were recognized with the IQ Innovation Award.

In this context, Authentic Vision with its Unique Label has been selected as one of the proud winners of the 2017 IQ Innovation Award. Jürgen Mathwich, co-founder and General Manager Authentic Vision Inc, did introduce the next generation brand protection solution to the interested professional wine industry audience. But how does Authentic Vision help the wine industry exactly?

Authentic Vision brings instant and automatic authentication, consumer insights and sales

Security is one of the key differentiators for Authentic Vision’s solution and is, therefore, the fundamental layer supporting in protecting value. The irreproducible Authentic Vision Unique Label is the core component of the solution, enabling a high level of security, based on a random hologram & encrypted QR code using instant and automatic authentication. It costs only a few cents per item, can be easily integrated into the existing design, is unique on every single wine bottle and can be scanned by every smartphone. This solution does effectively help fight increasing counterfeits and gray market issues. While the industry thrives on exports to China, it lets pop up problems on counterfeits and the gray market for bigger as well as smaller wine brands. To produce a bottle of faked wine cost a Chinese counterfeiter only about $0.60. And 50-70% of all alcohol is faked in China.

The security features of the unique label can be checked with a standard smartphone or any device with a camera and internet access. Thanks to this scan, users are able to verify the authenticity and origin of a product before consumption, while the manufacturers simultaneously get informed about fake attempts as well as business intelligence- and supply chain data. This helps to understand and predict consumers and their behavior: On the Authentic Vision’s intuitive cloud platform the brand gets insights into their consumer profiles, -demographics and -behavior.

On top, the scan may lead right from the packaging to direct-to-customer sales platforms or any other easily modifiable content. This brings benefits on distribution and consumer loyalty. The gross profit margin in the classic distribution model is about 50%. When implementing a direct-to-customer platform, it can get up to 75%. Concerning consumer loyalty, it does improve the consumer’s relationship to the brand. While younger generation wine lovers seem to be less loyal to a product, additional content and benefits bond them to a brand.

With this innovative product, Authentic Vision already helped Levensohn Vineyards and Guala Closures Group to take further steps regarding the smart anti-counterfeiting & re-filling solutions in the wine industry.