The barcode is dying. Here’s what replaces it.
For fifty years the barcode did one job: beep at the checkout. Thirteen digits, one function, no capacity for anything else. That era is ending, and not gradually.
In 2026 Tesco began replacing 1D barcodes with 2D QR codes across its entire own-label range. It started with thirteen lines of own-brand sausages and was built on two years of pilots. The same codes are being tested in 48 countries, with PepsiCo, Walmart, P&G, L’Oréal and Amazon involved.
When the UK’s largest grocer moves its own label, branded suppliers follow. Not because they are told to, but because the shelf around them changes and the retailer’s systems are now built to read something their packs do not carry.
What is forcing this
Four separate pressures are converging, and only one of them is a retailer decision.
GS1 Sunrise 2027. The global standards body has set the end of 2027 as the point at which retail point-of-sale systems should be able to read 2D codes. It is the infrastructure change underneath everything else: once the tills can read a QR code, the barcode stops being the only option.
PPWR. The EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation requires material composition, recyclability and disposal information to be available for every pack placed on the European market. Some of it must be on the pack. Much of it can sit behind a code.
Digital Product Passports. Being phased in by category, DPP requires a traceable digital record covering origin, materials, repairability and end of life. It is not a labelling exercise. It is a data obligation attached to a physical product, and it needs a way in from the product itself.
Extended Producer Responsibility and the EU E-Label. EPR shifts the cost of packaging waste onto producers and requires reporting to match. The E-Label allows regulated categories such as wine and spirits to move ingredient and nutrition data online rather than printing it.
A label cannot physically hold it
Put those requirements together and you are asking a surface the size of a postcard to carry ingredients, allergens, nutrition, material composition, recycling guidance, sustainability claims, origin and usage instructions, increasingly alongside a traceable product record, in several languages.
It does not fit. What happens instead is that the type shrinks until it is six points high, wrapped around a curved surface, printed in grey on silver. Technically present. Functionally unreadable.
This is the part worth sitting with. The regulations are not asking for more printing. They are asking for more information, and the pack ran out of room some time ago.
So every brand puts a code on every pack
That part is not a choice. The timelines are set, the retailer systems are moving, and the information obligations are growing rather than shrinking. Every brand selling into these markets will be printing a 2D code within the next two years.
The choice is what sits behind it.
You can spend the budget, meet the requirement, and point the code at a static PDF that nobody reads. The compliance box is ticked. The cost is incurred. Nothing else happens.
Or you can treat the same investment as the moment your product becomes a channel you own outright, with the compliance data sitting inside an experience rather than instead of one.
The difference in cost between those two options is small. The difference in what you get back is not.
This is already the baseline
81.2% of brands are already running product experiences, and 83.3% are planning another campaign this year. This is no longer early adoption.
The brands moving now are not experimenting. They are arriving at 2027 with three years of data, a working content operation and a direct line to their customers, while their competitors are still deciding which agency to brief.
Want to see what this looks like for your products? Get in touch.
