Barcoding Initiative

The meat and poultry industry supports the use of electronic scanning of bar codes.  Scanning enables efficient shipping, receiving, and selling processes, but more importantly, lays the foundation for food traceability processes.  Because the meat and poultry industry has both fixed weight and variable measure products, the industry supports the use of two bar code symbologies at the case level.  In addition, the meat and poultry industry supports additional bar code types at the consumer item level.  The case level bar codes used in the meat and poultry industry include the ITF-14 (Interleaved Two of Five) for fixed weight cases and the GS1-128 bar code for variable measure products.  The ITF-14 enables the capture of the product GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) while the GS1-128 enables manufacturers to include additional information about the product such as case weight and batch/lot information.

At the consumer item level, fixed weight products utilize the  UPC-A bar code symbology.  This bar code format is also used for non-perishable type products and only supports encoding of the product GTIN.  For perishable, commodity, and case-ready meat and poultry consumer items, most states regulate the inclusion of package weight, price per pound, and extended pricing on the label.  These requirements cannot be met by the UPC-A bar code symbology and consequently are administered through the use of a UPC-Type 2 bar code format.  As this symbology does not support the use of a GTIN, a retailer-assigned product identification value is provided to the manufacturer to be printed on the package.

mpXML working group members participated and contributed to the development of a new bar code symbology through the GS1 GSMP (Global Standards Management Process) in an effort to enhance the electronic scan on the consumer item level because of the limitations of the UPC-Type 2 bar code.  As a result, the GS1 Databar was developed and a Sunrise date of January 1, 2010 was agreed upon.   The GS1 DataBar symbology is the first new bar code format developed since the 1970s for the food industry.  It enables suppliers to encode the product GTIN and additional product information such as weight, price, batch/lot number and dates into the bar code.  mpXML participants are continuing to work through the GSMP process to develop implementation guidelines and recommended standards guidance for these additional attributes for the meat and poultry industry.

mpXML supports the use of bar code symbology as a recommended practice to enable product traceability processes.  While the capture of human readable information does support product traceability, the electronic scanning of product information provides a more accurate, timely, and efficient business process.  Thus, mpXML continues to support and provide guidance to members of the meat and poultry supply chain to facilitate adoption of the use of bar code scanning. 

More information about GS1's development of barcodes can be found at GS1's website.