One of the very rewarding projects I’ve been involved in over the last few years has been the GS1 Sunrise 2027 project – the transition from the long-established EAN and UPC barcodes to new, data-rich, 2D barcodes.
It’s exciting that we are at the point where many brands are starting to run pilots, or even convert complete product lines to the new barcodes.
GS1 Digital Link promises to transform the humble barcode into a dynamic data carrier. It’s potentially a game-changer, one 2D code that serves as a sustainability story for the consumer, a traceability tool for the retailer, and a compliance document for the regulator – all while being scannable at checkout in a retail store.
But in practice, delivering on this promise is rarely a technical challenge. Instead, it is often a governance nightmare.
Because your connected packaging touches almost every department in the organization, it could fall through the cracks. When you ask who owns the project, you usually get different answers depending on which floor of the office you are on.
Why Traditional Ownership Can Fail
The temptation is to slot this project into an existing departmental bucket. However, each traditional owner brings a specific blind spot that can jeopardize the rollout.
- Marketing: Excels at the consumer experience and campaign calendars but often overlooks data standards and supply chain constraints. This risks creating a polished front-end with a shallow technical foundation.
- IT: They can build a robust infrastructure, but they tend to treat it as a pure data exercise. The risk here is a technically perfect system that is unusable for the end consumer or ignored by the warehouse.
- Compliance & Regulatory: With the EU Digital Product Passport (DPP), Sunrise 2027 and new food information requirements looming, these teams have the most urgency. However, they are typically better at setting requirements than driving cross-functional delivery.
- Logistics: Their primary concern is operational speed. If a new code does not scan reliably in a high-speed warehouse environment, the project is a failure regardless of how connected it is.
- Package Design: Where will the new 2D code be printed on the package? What size should it be? What about the existing EAN/UPC code? Does the QR code contain variable data which will mean it can’t be pre-printed?
- QA: Concerned as to whether the 2D codes are correctly formatted to meet the GS1 specifications. What about print quality standards?
Why This Isn’t Just an IT Project
If you frame GS1 Digital Link as a data management initiative and hand it to the ERP team, you are setting it up for failure.
The value of the standard does not come from the architecture itself. It comes from the utility of the endpoints. Deciding what data to publish, how to keep it current, and how the user journey flows requires a level of collaboration that rarely happens naturally between IT and Marketing.
Getting these functions to move in the same direction is a leadership challenge rather than a coding one.
The Solution: A New Position?
The organizations successfully scaling GS1 Digital Link usually share one common trait: they have a leader with a clear mandate.
Whether they are called a Digital Transformation Lead or a Connected Packaging Manager, this person does not need to be an expert in every field. Instead, they act as the connective tissue between silos. Their role is to translate “data” for IT and “experience” for Marketing, while ensuring that packaging designers have the real estate needed for QR codes without compromising brand aesthetics.
Crucially, this lead must be backed by senior sponsorship; without this, territorial disputes between departments will inevitably stall the project somewhere between the proof of concept and the full rollout.
A Strategic Opportunity for Packaging Teams
For too long, packaging has been viewed as a cost center or simply the final step in the production chain. Connected packaging changes that conversation.
It places the packaging function at the absolute center of corporate strategy by bridging the gap between consumer experience, regulatory compliance, and supply chain visibility, especially if the 2D barcodes contain real-time data that has to be printed at the time of packaging.
The companies that win will not be those with the best software. They will be the ones who resolve their internal politics first. The technology is the easy part. The real work is getting the right people in the room and keeping them there until there is a concrete plan.
