What is GS1 Sunrise 2027? And Why It’s Part of a Smart Data Capture Revolution
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VP Product, CTO & Co-Founder
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Are we finally ready to say goodbye to traditional UPC/EAN barcodes? Fifty years after their invention, in April 2026 UK retailer Tesco became the first UK supermarket to ditch traditional barcodes.
Tesco's move is part of the GS1 Sunrise 2027 initiative — an ambitious project aiming to confine the 12 or 13-digit barcode to the annals of history.
Its replacement? A 2D Data Matrix or QR code that serves the traditional purposes of product identification and traceability, but can store far more information, up to 7,000 characters.
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Customers could benefit from user guides (such as washing instructions), or information on the provenance of goods and sustainability. Stores and retail workers will have more (and faster) access to information about recalls or sell-by dates, making inventory and discounting easier to manage.
Moving to QR codes will help us reduce food waste, improve stock control and unlock new digital benefits for our customers
The first phase of Sunrise 2027 saw dual use, with both QR/Data Matrix codes and traditional barcodes printed on packaging. Tesco is the first UK retailer to move to the next phase of replacing traditional barcodes entirely.
But more importantly, these smarter alternatives to EAN/UPC barcodes are just the visible edge of a much bigger smart data capture revolution.
What’s the big deal about 2D barcode technology, anyway?
A traditional UPC or EAN barcode is known as a 1D barcode. This means that all the data contained in it is organized horizontally in a pattern of black and white bars.
The pattern always encodes the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) – a unique number that distinguishes item and manufacturer.
2D barcodes are smarter. They have information encoded on both the horizontal and vertical axes. Because of this, they can hold significantly more information.
The new GS1 Sunrise standard will mean that as well as GTINs, barcodes can include additional and dynamic data, such as batch numbers, expiry dates, urls, or location data.
While it’s possible to use UPC/EAN barcodes to access additional information today, this depends on using the GTIN to look up information elsewhere. With QR and Data Matrix codes, rich information is included in the printed code itself, making access easier and reducing development effort.
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No one actually wants to scan a barcode
Harvard Business School Professor Theodore Levitt famously said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”
The truth is, no one in retail actually wants to scan a barcode. What they want is the rich product details behind it, shelves laid out the right way, prices that match the system, stock marked down before it expires, or in-store orders picked fast.
And these are million- or even billion-dollar problems for retailers. On average, 60% of SKUs are affected by inventory record inaccuracies. A recent US study estimated the total cost of poor information access at the frontline to be over $80 billion a year.
Barcode scanning has always been a means to an end, not an end in itself. Tesco's move to replace EAN codes with QR codes is a small part of a smart data capture mega-trend solving these problems by enabling real-time decision-making, engagement, and workflow automation at scale.
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The future of the barcode
Barcodes aren't likely to go away any time soon, but they are evolving. Increasingly, barcode scanning is embedded in integrated vision AI systems that also analyze images, text, IDs, and objects — and automatically adapt to different scenarios.
A grocery shopper wants nutritional information. A store associate needs to know which products to mark down or recall. Meanwhile, the regional manager needs to report to head office on planogram compliance.
Powered by vision AI, smart data capture combines multiple data sources and turns every scan into information that drives the next decision. It's about surfacing the right information at the right moment to the right person.
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Capture value, not just data
The GS1 Sunrise 2027 project is about much more than just replacing one type of barcode with another. At its core, the smart data capture revolution is about modernizing how the physical world of real stores, real products, and real shelves is managed.
Tesco's move "shows how the next generation of barcodes can support a more connected, transparent future," according to Anne Godfrey, CEO of GS1 UK. In many ways what we're looking at is the next wave of data democratization, empowering shoppers, frontline workers to move beyond just capturing data to deriving meaningful value from it in real time.
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