A new generation of barcodes is enabling faster, safer and more transparent transactions across industries and regions.
In this episode, Nicolas Frerejean (www.linkedin.com/in/nicolas-frerejean-9426b31/) , director of marketing and digital transformation at GS1, the global standards organization behind barcodes, tells Reed Smith partner Wim Vandenberghe (www.reedsmith.com/en/professionals/v/vandenberghe-wim) 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:
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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 tha...