GS1 is a neutral not-for-profit standards body, working with about 150 countries around the world to administer a set of standards for uniquely identifying products, locations and companies. Its mission is “the identification of everything makes anything possible,” says Bob Carpenter, president and chief executive officer of GS1 US.

There are enormous benefits to standardizing data about things, says Carpenter. “The first scan at point of sale in a retail grocery store was in 1974. And that began a whole series of productivity enhancements that have really helped revolutionize the supply chain space over the last 50 years.”

Barcodes use a one-dimensional code, but two-dimensional data-capture technologies, including radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, data matrix codes favored by healthcare, and increasingly common QR codes offer the ability to capture orders of magnitude more information.

But there’s a problem. Each of those codes might allow access to a unique URL controlled by the manufacturer, but there’s no ability for an outside party to alter that information — for example, to reflect that an expiry date has passed, or events in that product’s journey along the supply chain. 

GS1 is hoping to foster adoption of its version of the QR code technology that does allow additional information to be added along the way. 

“A product can be followed all the way through the supply chain to make sure that it's not counterfeit,” says Carpenter. “That chain of custody is maintained all the way through, so you have pedigree.”

In many instances, this achieves the integrity and richness of information about products in the supply chain that many are looking to blockchain for. Carpenter says that can be overkill. “I think people are sometimes applying a hammer to a problem that doesn't necessarily acquire that degree of force. Sometimes a good old-fashioned shared database is absolutely fine.”