Edison told us that success was about 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration!

QR codes with embedded expiry dates as a replacement for traditional bar codes, is the inspiration for food retailers looking to sell more and waste less, for the technology can block the sale of out of date items, transform the effectiveness of product recall programmes, lead to less surplus food in the store through better forecasting, reduce the quantity thrown away or donated, etc.

But to scale across retail as a replacement for bar codes will require a significant effort by the many actors that are needed to deliver and execute that change. Our report (click here) outlined who those actors might need to be and the ten requirements required for a scaled deployment.

In this meeting, we are going to hear from an industry expert, with two decades of experience of deploying and scaled QR codes across tobacco and pharmaceuticals. From this research, we hope to be able to draw some lessons that could be reapplied with a view to helping the retail industry realise its ambition to scale QR codes as a replacement for bar codes, in the first instance, across the perishables categories, faster and without government legislation as a requirement.

We will then hear from producers who have already started on their journey towards QR codes, and how they have changed their production and quality control processes in support of the change, and the benefits and challenges they have evidenced.

The meeting will also cover the critical questions around quality controls and standards where the challenge is to ensure that QR codes can be read, faster, more reliably and with less failures than standard barcodes, or at least at parity.

Finally, we will close the meeting with updates from the retailers. This meeting is for retailers, producers and academics.