The BBC recently reported that the Food Standards Agency has proposed that food outlets list all ingredients in order to protect customers with allergies  emphasising the importance of accurate and complete product data.

Beside tightening regulations, in this digital and ecommerce age, consumers expect to make purchases online and receive their products speedily. This means that the transfer of detailed data between retailers and suppliers need to be accurate and efficient. Research carried out by GS1 UK has found that an average large FMCG supplier can be working with as many as 55 grocery retailers and wholesalers. With such massive transfer of data, the barcode is the only way to ensure accuracy of product data and eliminate the need to manually enter product data that is prone to human error.

In UK, the retail grocery advisory board – which includes Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Co-Op, Ocado, Unilever, Nestlé and PepsiCo – identified product data management as a key concern. In 2017, they signed an industry charter announcing their commitment to move to a single solution for managing and exchanging data. This led to the creation of productDNA, a solution to the problems surrounding the transfer of product data in the supply chain.

The original article is published by New Food and can be found here.

In Singapore, GS1 Singapore has also started a similar initiative--The DNAHub --to help retailers and suppliers create digital contents (weCREATE) and manage product data exchange (weXCHANGE). For more information, call us at +65-68263077.