Page 42 - Food & Drink Magazine April 2019

20:20 vision for coding in the next decade
In the next ten years, evolving technology will bring innovations and new business models, writes Matthews CEO Mark Dingley.
WHAT will the 2020s bring to coding? The technologies that manufacturers are familiar with have been around for some time. Certainly there are ongoing evolutions, but they are, in essence, not new.
One of the main talking points today is “traceability”. Current technologies and solutions have served here well. For example, in primary applications with date and batch codes, product or global trade item number (GTIN) barcodes, 2D codes such as QR and Datamatrix are in place. For secondary and tertiary levels, there are shipper barcodes for cartons and serial shipping container code
(SSCC) barcodes for pallets. It’s been noteworthy to see
the increased interest in serialisation during the latter part of this decade for authentication and proof of provenance. Serialisation is certainly not new, but many manufacturers have been drawn to its simplicity and effectiveness for supply chain traceability, especially for high-value products to China, and thus its great power to counteract the bane of high-quality Australian manufacturers: the counterfeiter with food fraud.
Manufacturers tend to be very comfortable with these coding technologies and
solutions because of their longevity in the industry. But a really interesting question now is “where are we going?”. How will coding advance in the next decade?
IT’S ALL ABOUT TRACEABILITY
There is no doubt that traceability and transparency through the supply chain will continue to increase in importance. Coding is an inherent part of that.
An excellent example is the new industry working group for the Supply Chain Improvement Project, of which Matthews is a member.
This project uses GS1 global
42 | Food&Drink business | April 2019 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au