>Coca-Cola has used the new generation of codes in parts of Latin America for refillable bottles, with the QR code allowing the counting of refills so that a requirement of 25 before recycling can be enforced.
More tracking!
Some of this looks great, but some of those benefits are literally never going to materialize.
> barcodes highlighting allergens and other dangers
Walgreens, CVS, and Walmart already sell homeopathic sugar pills labeled as closely as legally possible to real medication, stored in the same sections, intermingled one box to the next on the same shelf. The lack of information about a product isn't a technology issue; it's a combination of proper information being expensive to produce and more expensive when it keeps you from buying a lower-production-cost alternative.
You see this in all kinds of markets. Say you want to buy a plant grow lamp; you want physical dimensions, power in, and power out. If you're a nerd or using a lot of them you might like the wavelength distribution (_and_ the units used to produce it), the weight, whether it has UV protection, .... That information is ommitted from most Amazon listings and the packaging from most big box stores. Why is it missing? I guarantee the problem isn't that they used a barcode instead of a QR code.
This is a confusing article.
Doing price lookups based on barcode-encoded identifier scanned in at the point of sale doesn’t change radically if the encoded format is a UPC or a QR code. We’re probably getting close to the point where most retailers now have POS equipment that can handle QR codes, and manufacturers can consider leaving UPC codes off of their packaging.
Outside of a point-of-sale context, you’ve always been able to look up other data based on the product identifier. Not sure how QR codes change that.
How much data can the code store? I doubt it will contain all of that information, but rather, a URL. Like the other post said, more tracking!
Aldi uses huge barcodes to speed up scanning [0]. I‘m not sure it would make sense to replace those with two-dimensional codes.
[0] https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/why-are-aldi-barcodes-so...
They speak of "QR-style" barcodes, but it's very unclear to me whether GS1 is actively pushing QR or DataMatrix as the preferred 2D barcode style. In medical devices and pharmaceuticals, both the 1D and 2D DataMatrix GS1 barcodes have been used extensively for quite some time so I would personally think DataMatrix is the way to go. I'm just a casual observer though. Is there anybody here that has more inside knowledge on what the game plan is?
We need to decentralize barcodes by treating product lookups as a URL, with metadata as query parameters. This way GS1 can operate much differently.
Given the IPv6 case, I will handle this one with care.
One of the ideas I was toying with a few years ago was a machine-readable nutrition label, but self-contained rather than involving a database lookup (there just aren't that many bits of entropy in a nutrition facts table, so it's practical to just encode it in a reasonable-size 2D barcode).
I thought they could be useful for e.g. boxed lunches at a conference, or printed on a "mom and pop" restaurant menu, or in a cookbook, where maintaining a central database isn't really practical (aside from avoiding tracking).
It would also be easy to encode things like "Vegan" or "meat-free" or "contains nuts" which could be helpful to blind/low-vision folks or people who don't want to read through a 50-ingredient list to find out something contains shrimp extract or whatever.
I only got as far as setting up a domain (https://nut.codes) and a couple of aborted attempts at prototyping (https://github.com/nut-codes).