Three giant consumer products manufacturers, frustrated with losses from shoplifting and counterfeiting, have formed an alliance to develop a global standard for security tags on packaging. Procter & Gamble, Johnson and Johnson and Eastman Kodak hope to begin trials of a prototype standardised tag early next year. Once a workable system has been found the consortium will hand over the licensing to a not-for-profit organisation. The tags will be built into products' packaging rather than attached manually; they will carry basic product information, and should be adaptable to new technologies such as tills that instantly scan entire contents of a supermarket trolley.