Adulteration refers to the deliberate addition of inferior or foreign substances to food products, often for financial gain. This practice poses serious risks to public health, leading to illnesses, allergies, or even fatalities. It also undermines consumer trust and damages brand reputation. In today’s complex food supply chain, traceability and transparency are crucial to ensure food safety. GS1 identification keys provide unique, standardised methods, such as barcodes and RFID tags, as a robust solution to combat food adulteration. By enabling unique identification, accurate tracking, tracing, and verification of food products till point-of-sale, barcodes in food products help ensure integrity and safety across the food supply chain. In this blog, let’s learn the role played by GS1 standards and uncover the benefits that can be achieved.
GS1 is a global supply chain standards organisation that develops and manages universally accepted supply chain standards. These standards create a common foundation for businesses by enabling unique identification, accurate capture, and automatic sharing of product information. Different products throughout a supply chain are uniquely identified using 12 GS1 ID keys. These ID keys include GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) for retail products, GLN (Global Location Number) for locations, SSCC (Serial Shipping Container Code) for cartons/higher level packaging, GIAI (Global Individual Asset Identifier) for individual assets, GRAI (Global Returnable Asset Identifier) for returnable assets, and more.
When it comes to initiating end-to-end visibility in the food supply chain, barcodes in food products have an imperative role to play. Beginning from the unique identification of raw materials till the final product reaches the end-consumer, the whole supply chain consists of multiple stakeholders, including farmers, wholesalers, distributors, suppliers, and retailers.
Food companies automate data capture by encoding GS1 ID keys in barcodes and ensure products are tracked seamlessly throughout the supply chain. This automated system provides several benefits to companies, such as reduced errors, minimised delays, and improved inventory management, resulting in cost savings for businesses and faster deliveries to customers. As a result, both businesses and consumers benefit from an efficient and reliable food supply chain.
Let’s first look at the 12 GS1 ID keys used in the supply chain and the barcodes used for data capture.
Traceability refers to the process of tracing back the complete journey travelled by an item throughout its lifetime. GS1 has developed specific standards to provide the framework for the design and implementation of traceability systems. This ensures that farm-to-fork traceability of food products can be achieved with systems that are interoperable, standardised, structured, transparent, and scalable. Based on these standards, GS1 India provides its DataKart Trace service. Multiple Indian industries have subscribed to this service. It is tailored based on the specific needs and requirements of businesses. They can leverage cutting-edge features of the service to achieve near real-time visibility on goods in transit.
DataKart Trace is also an effective solution to address the problem of food adulteration. When businesses have real-time visibility of their products throughout the supply chain, they can identify problems at the earliest and work collectively with authorities, stakeholders, and consumers to solve them. With DataKart Trace, businesses get answers to the 5Ws - When did the product leave? Where did the product leave from? Where was the product shipped to? Where is the shipment currently located? When did the product arrive? Businesses get the following features when they register for DataKart Trace with GS1 India -
Barcode in food products provide multiple benefits to the food and agriculture industry, especially when it comes to mitigating issues such as food adulteration. Below are some ways these standards help the sector -
Blockchain traceability is the process of recording all data related to a product’s movement in the supply chain. This technology has a decentralised and immutable nature that helps track and trace products every step of the way. Blockchain traceability is poised to be the next-gen solution to mitigate such malicious practices occurring across supply chains. By providing a transparent and tamper-proof record of the product’s journey, the blockchain traceability solution can efficiently prevent, mitigate, and rectify issues such as adulteration and contamination.
Some examples of blockchain traceability in the food & agriculture sector include blockchain-based traceability of ghee, where GS1 India collaborated with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to ensure each batch of ghee can be traced with distributed pathways and immutable data. and Big Basket’s pilot poultry traceability project to track the complete lifecycle, from chick placement to slaughtering, packaging, and sale via Fresho.
Food adulteration is the illegal or unethical practice of adding harmful, non-food substances to food products or substituting higher-quality ingredients with lower-quality ones. It is a huge concern as it can negatively affect the health, happiness and safety of consumers.
Food adulteration is responsible for causing mild to severe health impacts and financial damage to consumers.
GS1 codes on food products can improve traceability in the supply chain, ensure accessibility to accurate information in near real-time, help validate product authenticity, and more.
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