Cutting costs and increasing consumer confidence: there is a solution!

It is a constant problem that a retail chain is unable to sell certain products before their date of expiry and they have to be collected from the shelves.

Ágota Kiss, the head of SGS Hungária Kft.’s agricultural and consumer good division told our magazine that the company has been inspecting production hygiene and product quality for 20 years, together with the weight and expiry date of products. According to her, it is high time retail chains used information technology solutions for these problems, just like it is done in other countries. This way retailers can be informed before selling if something is wrong with the product. Relabelling and counterfeiting scandals in the last few years made it clear that product identification and tracking are key elements of food safety. The problem is that in the case of fruits/vegetables or meats existing IT solutions are not capable of guaranteeing precise information and lots of extra work has to be done by store staff. GS1 DataBar is a family of symbols on GS1 barcodes, which contains key information related to the product, e.g. date of expiry, weight, etc. This makes it possible to introduce new types of services, such as promotions before a product expires or blocking expired products. Another important advantage of GS1 DataBar is that unlike the GS1-128 symbol or the QR code, this family of symbols can be scanned with most scanners currently used at store checkouts. Zoltán Krázli, GS1 Hungary’s senior expert told us that these barcodes are increasingly popular in Europe and are used in the neighbouring countries too. For instance in Austria and Belgium the expiry date and the lot number are contained in the barcode of fruits/vegetables in REWE and Delhaize stores. LOTTE Mart in Korea added new services to the expiry date coded in GS1 DataBar symbols: the selling of expired products is automatically blocked at the checkout and two products that will expire in 4 days are sold 20 percent cheaper, while those expiring in 2 days there is a 40-percent discount – it is not surprising that sales of the two products soared by 60 and 32 percent. By introducing the new system retailers can increase consumer confidence. Richárd Járai, deputy commercial director of Szintézis Information Technology Zrt. informed Trade magazin that GS1 DataBar is a traditional linear barcode, so the majority of currently used scanners and price checkers recognise GS1 DataBar and no technological development is needed to start using it. In the case of retail systems created by Szintézis, a simple software update is enough to adopt the new solution. If you would like to know more, please write to the following address: krazli@gs1hu.org