Retail Industry, CPGs Support Switch from UPC to Data-Rich Barcode

A new research study, Powering the Future of Retail, from information standards organization GS1 US has reveales that 82% of retailers and 92% of brand owners support transitioning from the UPC code to a data-rich 2D barcode, a digital watermark, and/or an RFID tag in the next one to five years.  The next-generation barcode(s) to be chosen by industry will embed more information on product packaging and continue to leverage the GS1 Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) standard—the number encoded in the UPC that uniquely identifies a product at checkout.