It’s official – size matters!
by Gary Hartley,
GS1 New Zealand
Have you noticed them yet? Those small barcode stickers on the Californian stone fruit available in your local supermarket’s fresh produce section? Those stickers carry what’s known as the GS1 Databar – a new form of barcode – a globally-standardised barcode that will bring huge benefits to retailers and consumers over the next few years. With these compact little symbols – the George Gregan of the barcode world – there’s more to them than meets the eye.
The GS1 Databar radically shrinks the ‘footprint’ or space required on items that the more familiar barcodes take up. But it’s not just the smaller size that is attracting global attention – these codes can carry more information about a product than the more familiar code barcodes as well.
The small-sized GS1 DataBar is ideal for hard-to-mark consumer items and for loose produce, like the Californian stone fruit, for example, that has appeared in New Zealand supermarkets since mid-winter. North American grocery chains now require GS1 DataBar to be applied to such products – because of the added benefits provided. The barcode is scannable at the checkout to automatically identify each piece of fruit or vegetable being sold.
Stickers on those Californian nectarines and plums are the first appearance of GS1 DataBar in the Kiwi marketplace. They have been applied by growers or packhouses covered by the California Tree Fruit Agreement, without differentiation between fruit for domestic or export consumption. MG Marketing, this country’s biggest importer of fresh produce, brings the fruit in from June-October. As yet, however, there is no checkout scanning of the new barcode in our supermarkets because advanced scanning equipment is required – but there will be in the near future.
The benefits of GS1 DataBar in a retail setting lie in its small size, of course, but another major advantage is that it can also encode such things as item weight, batch number, and use-by date, among other attributes. Beyond grocery retail, there are also many benefits and applications. Take healthcare, for example, with the large number of small items prevalent in this sector. The small symbol size has obvious advantages but also being able to encode information such as, batch number, lot, serial number, and expiry date into the barcode will be very useful.
So, even though GS1 DataBar was ‘invented’ with grocery items in mind, there’s good use cases for many industry sectors. GS1 DataBar scanning can radically expand visibility of what is being sold and when. For consumers, there is greater promise of reassurance on the authenticity, quality, and pricing of their purchases.
The GS1 DataBar is on track to become an open global standard in barcoding worldwide from 1 January 2014: that is the date from which mass use is expected in the supply of goods for sale at retail. But we can expect the new form of barcodes to appear increasingly in New Zealand from now on. Indeed, nothing stops trading partners in New Zealand, or anywhere else, starting to use the GS1 DataBar by mutual agreement tomorrow.
The North American grocery chains have moved early with a requirement on their suppliers – and, of course, these include some New Zealand exporters. Apple marketers, ENZA and The Heartland Group are preparing to apply stickers with the GS1 DataBar when the next export selling season starts in February 2010.
For ENZA, the US and Canada account for around 25 per cent of total export sales and this company is taking the new requirement well in its stride, after trialling GS1 DataBar on some of its apples in recent years. ENZA has lined up a New Zealand supply of GS1 DataBar stickers that encode the apple variety, country of origin, exporter, and price look-up number (PLU). The barcodes also identify whether the apple has organic certification or not. Along with all this, the stickers continue to show the distinctive ENZA logo, plus apple variety and PLU in human-readable form.
New stickers on our apples to the US – and on Californian nectarines arriving here – are definitely a sign of things to come. It has been about 30 years since the first barcodes appeared in Kiwi supermarkets. We can expect to see far more of them in the years to come, with even greater utility for both retailers and consumers as the GS1 DataBar is applied increasingly to fresh produce and many other categories of product.
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