Every case that arrives at our depots carries a barcode, and for as long as I have worked here that barcode has said one thing: which product this is. Thirteen or fourteen digits, read by a laser on a handheld scanner, matched to a line in our stock system. The batch and the dates printed beside it are for people, and almost nobody reads them.
That is about to change. The retail industry has set itself a target, under the barcode standards body, for tills to be able to read two dimensional codes by the end of 2027, and the manufacturers who supply us have already started printing them. One square code holds the product number and also the batch, the expiry date and sometimes a serial number for that single item. We will receive these codes whether we are ready or not.
Last year showed me what it could be worth. A manufacturer recalled one batch of a floor cleaning chemical after a fault in its mixing. We held about two thousand three hundred cases of that product across our depots, and nothing in our systems knew which batch any of them came from. We quarantined all of them for nine days while staff checked boxes by hand, and the recalled batch turned out to be a hundred and eighty cases at three sites.
When we looked at what it would take to use the new codes, the gaps were plain. About six hundred of our fourteen hundred scanners are laser models that cannot read a square code at all. Our stock system records a product and a quantity at a location, with no field for batch or expiry, so even a scanner that read them would have nowhere to send them.
So the scanners due for replacement next year will all read square codes, and the rest are being brought forward. Batch and expiry are being added to the stock record for goods in, starting with chemicals and other products that are recalled most often. Four of our ten largest suppliers have already changed their codes.
For decades a barcode has told us what something is. The next one will tell us which one it is, and the value will only reach businesses whose systems have somewhere to keep the answer.
– Serguey Shinder
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