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throckmorten [soylentnews.org] writes:

GS1, the global standards organisation for barcodes, has started to advertise their Sunrise 2027 program for adding 2D barcodes to products.
https://www.gs1digital.link/sunrise-2027/ [gs1digital.link]
https://www.gs1us.org/industries-and-insights/by-topic/sunrise-2027 [gs1us.org]

Long story short this adds an 2D barcode to product labels alongside the existing 1D barcode. The 2D barcode gives extra info to the retailer (assuming the manufacturer adds it to the barcode) like batch/lot #, expiry date etc and can also provide a URL for the product to the consumer where they can find out more info about the product. There's even a complete fake brand set up to show off the concept - https://dalgiardino.com/ [dalgiardino.com]

Since most POS apps are likely going to be confused by 2 barcodes on 1 product and potentially double-charge you for your favourite box of cornflakes the scanner vendors are implementing a feature where they'll only send 1 barcode to the POS system; for legacy scanners that'll be the 1D barcode (like now), for new scanners that can read 2D barcodes it can either be specific GS1 tags or the entire barcode depending on what the POS application wants.

Note that this is already live for some manufacturers and geographies, 2027 is just when it's intended to be deployed globally.

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