A new generation of barcodes is enabling faster, safer and more transparent transactions across industries and regions.

In this episode, Nicolas Frerejean, director of marketing and digital transformation at GS1, the global standards organization behind barcodes, tells Reed Smith partner Wim Vandenberghe how the next generation of barcodes can offer even more information and benefits to consumers, businesses and regulators. He shares fascinating examples of how barcodes are used in retail, healthcare, food, construction and other sectors.

Whether you are a manufacturer, a retailer, a consumer or a policy maker, you will find this podcast insightful and informative.

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Transcript:

Intro: Trading Straits brings legal and business insights at the intersection of the shipping and energy sectors. This podcast series offers trends, developments, challenges and topics of interest from Reed Smith litigation, regulatory and finance laws across our network of global offices. If you have any questions about the topics discussed on this podcast, please do contact our speakers.

Wim: Hello and welcome to Trading Straits. My name is Wim Vandenberghe and I am a EU regulatory product lawyer in the Brussels office of Reed Smith. With me on today's podcast we have Nicolas Frerejean who is the Global Director of Marketing and Digital Transformation at GS1. Nicolas, thanks first of all for participating in our podcast on the global supply chain and what the role barcodes in GS1 play in there. Maybe to kick off, could you just please tell us a little bit about yourself and GS1?

Nicolas: Yeah, hello, Wim, and hello to everyone. Thank you for receiving me to this podcast. Really excited to be able to spend a few minutes talking about GS1. Myself, I'm from Belgium. My name is Nicolas Frerejean, and I've been working for the last five years at GS1, managing deployment of all our global marketing initiatives across our local organizations. And what is GS1? That's a great question to start. GS1 is really a global standards organization. We are a neutral, not-for-profit organization, and I guess we are best known for one of our iconic products, which is the barcode. The barcode has been named by the BBC as one of the top 15 inventions that made the world economy. And this is one of the icons that we do behind this. We actually do develop global open standards to facilitate and to help the exchange of data across industries and across trading partners in the supply chain.

Wim: Excellent. We're very happy, you know, that you could carve out some time today with us, Nicolas. And then I think you touched already on, you know, kind of the first question that I had about what the impact of barcodes has been, you know, for the last five decades, because they've been around for quite a while. And you've said it has been an amazing invention and really critical to the global economy. And I'm just wondering how you see that impact from the past, but also looking ahead into the future, what is coming next for barcodes as well?

Nicolas: Yeah, the barcode was actually introduced for the first time 50 years ago. That was in 1974. and the very first product that was count was a chewing gum pack in Ohio in the United States. The barcode really changed the way consumers check out at the point of sale and by enabling to identify a product and connect that product to its digital identity we've been able to connect the product to its price and make sure that we can make supermarket queues a lot shorter make the checkout process faster. And then also over time, we've grown the use of the barcodes to help making supply chain much more efficient and to help the management of inventory, stock the fulfillment at distribution centers. Now, the barcode, as I've said before, has already been around for 50 years. And while it will still be around for many years, we are starting to work on what we call the next-generation barcode. And we are starting to work with industry to transition to the next generation of barcodes, such as, for instance, QR codes powered by GS1 or the GS1 data matrix.

Wim: Right and I mean do you have, I mean you have such you know so much experience, I mean do you have a couple of like use cases for those next generation barcodes you know that just as an example you know what exactly can be done with it.

Nicolas: Of course. The the main difference between the traditional barcode and the next generation barcode like a QR code is that they can carry much more information than traditional barcode and they can also enable consumers to with a simple scan to connect to the web and and as such manufacturers can start having much more information in the next generation barcode such as the batch of the log number such as expiry dates for the product and so on and so forth so that would enable for instance consumers to actually scan a product in the supermarket market and get access to the information which is linked to that specific product. They would be able to know where does it come from? Where was it produced? Was it produced in a sustainable way? What are the ingredients if we're talking about a food product? Does it contain allergens? And all of that, we enable consumers to make better choices and also safer choices for them when it comes, for instance, to food products.

Wim: Right. It's clear that this is really something that applies kind of cross-sectoral you know you've touched on retail and supermarkets I can imagine you know also in kind of let's say energy of commodities it'll play a role as well as in you know healthcare and life science. How do you see that you know that kind of like cross-sectoral application?

Nicolas: Yeah we have expanded over the years across many industries and this next generation barcode can truly play a role across different industries, making sure that in the end we can improve the experience for consumers, the safety also for consumers and patients and even traceability across different industries. Let me maybe give you two examples starting with retail then moving to healthcare. When it comes to retail we have seen with different industry members. Let me mention Woolworths, which is the largest retailer in Australia. They've been able to include in fresh products the expiry date of the product to make sure that products that would get closer to the expiry date would actually benefit from dynamic pricing and be sold faster to consumers. And also that products who would have passed the expiry date would actually be stopped at the checkout. The impact was that Woolworths has been able to reduce food waste by 40% and also enable that products with expiry date, which have passed, would not be sold to consumers, making sure that it would enable a much more safe supply chain for the consumers. In healthcare, actually the next generation barcode has been around already for 20 years. Also enabling in the healthcare industry better traceability, better efficiency of some processes in the industry, and in the end also improving the safety for the patient. Two examples also, nurses in the hospital would actually be able to scan medicines before giving it to the patient to make sure that that would match the right prescription. That the dosing would be correct and preventing possible medical errors. Instruments in the surgery room would also carry a next-generation barcode to make sure that they can be scanned before and after the surgery, making sure that all the equipment would be accounted for, sterilized, and also preventing mistakes. So very, very, very concrete use cases on how that simple next-generation barcode can help safety for consumers and patients. We are now also expanding the use across different industries, construction industry, rail industry. All of that is helping to better trace products across the supply chain, making sure that we know exactly how to use them, and also helping sustainability. Because by knowing exactly what we use and by being able to trace product across the supply chain, that eventually enables to recycle and to move more and more towards a circular economy.

Wim: These are great examples and all those aspects about guaranteeing or safeguarding food safety or traceability of drugs, medicine and devices, and ESG and sustainability requirements, they are so much top of regulations, right? I mean, a lot of that has also been imposed, whether it's the US Drug Supply Act or here in Europe, with ESG requirements and product digital passport coming in in the next couple of years. That kind of brings me a little bit to the next question is that what is the role that regulatory bodies would play in the adoption of those kind of new next generation barcodes? But also like GS1, you know, who is actually kind of doing the work, implementing all of that.

Nicolas: Yeah, this is a great question. We see all over the world a growing trend for more regulations and regulations asking for more transparency about the products, making sure that the products would be safer for consumers and for patients and making sure that they can also make more informed choices about what they buy, what they consume, and what they use. And as such, with GS1, we are working very closely with authorities, with regulations, to understand how we can support the implementation of regulations and support the industry by doing so. One of the main benefits of GS1 is that we develop open standards. And by having open standards, we make sure that anyone across the value chain, across different countries can use them, from very large organizations, but also small organizations. And we make sure also tha...