It is also (correctly) pointed out that some food companies have been able to negotiate with Walmart in order to use the print technology of their choice. This is fine and corresponds with what we and our customers have found as well. The Packaging world article started off by reporting that Walmart had no feedback on their mandate. Then, a couple of weeks ago, an article on this topic appeared in Packaging World Magazine which has caused some confusion for many of our customers. We know of some companies that have complied, some have done nothing and others that have worked with Walmart’s team to get their case barcoding method approved. Everyone in the industry shares Walmart’s aim of getting best possible barcodes on every type of package, which means optimizing the technology used for each application. Business has been going along uninterrupted and here at ID Technology, we’ve been shipping a lot of labeling and printing systems to Walmart suppliers. The response to the Walmart mandate has been very mixed. Obviously, suppliers to Walmart were not thrilled with the new barcode mandate and didn’t rush to make changes or get into compliance. Instead of buying pre-printed cases for every item sold through retailers, suppliers often use generic packaging and customize with the correct text and barcodes on the packaging line – improving efficiency and reducing cost. This new mandate conflicted with the trend of in-line printing that had become common on packaging lines as well as contradicting Walmart’s own specification for frozen bakery products. In essence, Walmart’s new mandate stated that the GS1 GTIN barcodes on shipping cases were only acceptable if printed using flexographic print technology, using artwork approved by Walmart.
We posted information on this at the time – you can read it here. Walmart advised only barcodes that were pre-printed using the flexographic process would be acceptable. Walmart wants to improve efficiency in the supply chain and in their stores and it was determined that improving the quality and accuracy of the barcodes on the packaging would help with this project. See the examples below.It has been ten months since Walmart advised a lot of their suppliers of changes to barcode requirements for shipping cases and trays.
#Walmart product search by barcode number full#
The full 14-digit GTIN is achieved on a data carrier of shorter length by ‘padding’ the number with left-justified zeros out to 14 digits.
The entire family of data structures within the GTIN is: GTIN is also an umbrella term that refers to the entire family of UCC.EAN data structures. The GTIN is a globally unique 14-digit number used to identify trade items, products, or services. Please click here to learn about the Sunrise 2005 initiative. Due to the limitations of early technology and programming, a sunrise date was established in the early 2000’s to prepare retailers and manufacturers for the changes. GS1 has continually changed the standards of the issuing numbers, since GS1 standards are being integrated by other industries and more companies are requiring prefixes. Since the inception of bar codes with the UPC more than 45 years ago, hundreds of thousands of possible number combinations have been issued as manufacturer or company prefixes. Since the original UPC-A was only 12-digits, this resulted in a massive undertaking but the open door for GTIN data structures to be globally accepted. In the early 2000s retailers had to make accommodations to their original database structures to accept GTINs and the full 14-digit data string. GTIN changes this by separating the name of the data structure from the data carrier or, in this case, the symbology. In most cases, the legacy terminology and the symbology are called by the same name. The table below further illustrates the relationship between GTIN, legacy terminology, symbologies and use at point of sale. Therefore, these symbologies support the GTIN data structure without changing the number of encoded data characters. Both UPC and EAN have an implied packaging level of a single item. Of these, ITF-14, GS1-128, and GS1 Databar employ 14-digit data structures of which the 14th character is a packaging level indicator (i.e., item or case). Today, five symbologies support this GTIN data structure: UPC EAN ITF-14 GS1-128 and GS1 Databar (formerly Reduced Space Symbology).
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