Well Hello There, New Bar Codes
Snazzy new bar codes are starting to adorn our fruit and vegetables to stop blurry-eyed cashiers from ringing up organic produce as the cheaper-priced regular stuff. They're called GS1 DataBars, and they're already appearing in select supermarkets to help consumers move faster through checkout lines.
"It's quicker and far more accurate," Mr. Biddiscombe said. But the system is valuable not only for speeding checkout times and for keeping track of different varieties of bulk vegetables and fruits sold. It also prevents another checkout problem: cashiers mistaking organic vegetables for less expensive, conventionally grown ones, and ringing them up for the lower price.
"The price difference between organic and field tomatoes may be 40 cents a pound or more," he said. "When they aren't rung up as organic, that bites into our profit margins."
Kelly Kirschner, senior marketing manager at Sinclair International, a company in Fresno, Calif., that makes labeling for produce, said DataBars were gradually becoming popular because of limitations of the standard bar code. The standard code, she said, "takes up too much space to be used on loose produce, plus it is for fixed-weight items" - for example, 12-ounce boxes of cereal. The DataBar, by contrast, allows stores to scan for variable weight information.
Has anyone seen these yet?
The Bar Code Is Taking a Leap Forward [The New York Times]
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Comments:
Personally, they sound great, but I have NO FAITH that the products sold on my supermarket shelves are actually "organic" when labeled as such.
The store employees could stack the regular old apples where the organic sign is and no one can tell the difference except in the price.
The same of packaged goods. How can any consumer confirm that a product was product with organic ingredients? YOU CAN'T. Manufacturers can say something is organic because their supplier said an ingredent was and there is no way I can tell.
No thanks. I eat healthy, but I won't pay extra for something I can prove exists.
and I'll still peel of the sticker from the cheapest apple and put it on the expensive one I want... next step, rfid inside the apple... that would stop me ;)
@PLATTWORX: Check the stickers. They're applied at the distributor, not in-store. All organic produce has a PLU that begins with 9. In fact, the PLU is just the conventional PLU with a 9 in front. For example, bananas are PLU 4011. Organic bananas are 94011. Of course, if the supplier is lying, this won't help, but there's supposed to be some audit system in place.
I also don't bother with organics, but there's not much the store can do to screw you in the line of fake organics.
Suppliers have started to put these on their produce, but not all stores are supporting them yet. The store I work at is receiving apples with these new stickers but scanning them results in literally nothing happening - not even a "Not on File" error message.
@PLATTWORX: Well, there is a certification process to be able to use the organic label and fines for not being in compliance with organic standards. Now obviously this isn't a guarantee but there is no more guarantee that the produce you have will not give you salmonella or meets USDA standards.
Picking on organics is not fair.
I'm not sure how this is gonna work. You don't scan most fruits and veggies because they're sold by the pound so they have to be on the scale when the register gets the code.
Also, when I was a cashier, red apples were 4016, bananas were 4011, etc. unless I happened to see a different sticker when I picked them up that identified them as organic. All the cashiers memorized the regular codes because they were used far more often than the organic ones, and looking up a code really hurts your scan time.
it's FRUIT, not fruitS
Saw these today in a Meijer outside in Indianapolis on fruits and vegetables. Granted, I only realized this once I got home and was prepping them.
Also, for Chortik fruits is an acceptable form and is generally used for referring to more than one type of fruit. Just to keep everyone honest here. So whether you say fruit or fruits, these barcodes are appearing.
I agree with Plattworx, that you can't verify that anything is 'organic'. And there are so many definitions of 'organic'.
Great for produce sold by quantity. Stupid for produce sold by weight.
I've seen them around for a few months now.
I haven't seen one scanned yet.
@madanthony: Hey! Sometimes its not the onion... its the fact that the market has 4 different onions, all different prices, but will be missing vidalia and just have plain white onion in the produce screen with NO code to plug in.
Carey has the hots for bar codes?
I have seen them on all (most) of my fruit for a while now. The supermarket just ignores it and enters the code anyway.
You seem to have gone past judgmental and are a couple furlongs into twatwaffle territory.
I imagine you pull one out of the bag, scan it, and then weigh the whole lot. Assuming they aren't sold individually.
@Phil McKinney: Why? I have never worked as a grocery checkout person, so can you explain why it would be any different than existing practices? Wouldn't it be a simple matter of scanning one sticker, placing all identical produce on the scale, and ringing it in? I mean, the article itself specifically says that the new code is ideal for things sold by weight, where the previous/existing bar code system is not.
@bombhand: That sounds like it would take longer than the current practice of looking at the sticker on one of the apples, punching in the code, and pressing "PLU". If you're going to look for an apple with a sticker on it, it might as well have the code. That way, you can be done with it.
Organic produce, in my store at least, has a number that starts with a 9.
@chortik:
Depends on the usage...either can be correct.
"Many fruits grow on this island" is akin to saying "Many different kinds of fruit grow on this island."
Looking at the buffet and going "that's a lot of fruit!" while looking at apples, bananas, melons, and graps, is akin to saying "that's a lot of fruit !"
Which is completely different from saying "that's a lot of fruits!" which is perfectly correct when watching a gay pride parade.
@computerwiz3491: Some of the produce at my store has barcodes on it. They scan accidentally sometimes when I'm trying to weigh them. The register beeps, meaning it doesn't know what it is.
Hmmm...apparently the editor thingy didn't like my annotation to designate an implied meaning in the second "that's a lot of fruit" bit. In-between the "of" and the "fruit" was supposed to be a bit saying "in a generic, non-species-specific way."
Did it again. Apparently you can't have even a single, um, the pointy greater-than/less-than symbols above the comma and period, in your post. Oddness.
I cashier at Walmart, so here is how they work:
What the register does in most cases is recognize that it's a fruit/veggie when scanned. It will either say PLACE ITEM ON SCALE, PRESS ENTER or ENTER QUANTITY, PRESS ENTER. If it's a weighed item, it will take the scale weight.
That being said, these tags are dumb. If you're like any grocery cashier, you know the majority of your PLU codes, so these stickers are just worthless. I'm not going to sit there trying to scan a banana when I can just type in "4011." At the same token, it's kind of hard to put these on broccoli, lettuces, etc.
@Jessica Haas: Except xrmb is committing fraud, not theft, and you seem to have missed the difference in your haste to condemn.
I appreciate the responses. However, as the sign rises each day, I am certain we will someday see blaring headlines "ORGANICS OFTEN WERE NOT ORGANICS, CONSUMERS WASTED MILLIONS."
That is how commerce works. There are some suppliers somewhere cuting corners and marking their items "organic" just so they can sell them for more.
One of the reasons for the bar code is product traceability....back to the grower/packer source.
Also think about the future when you can just push the cart through the checklane and some fricken lasers scan everything all at once. Remember that ATT commercial?
@henwy: That's assuming their point of sale software can handle that. Even if it can, it's extremely slow:
1. take one out of bag
2. scan it
3. put it back in the bag
4. put the bag on the scale
5. push enter
Versus:
1. put the bag on the scale
2. enter the code
And you'd better hope the scanner doesn't catch the barcode of something when you're taking it off the scale. Barcodes for weighed items that are attached to said items are incredibly inconvenient.
@Coles_Law: @PLATTWORX: So do you avoid buying milk because you can't verify that it was actually pasteurized?
Organic food is huge business and it's only getting bigger. Many a company stake their reputation and livelihood on the fact that they produce and sell organic products. Verifying a product as organic is both costly and time consuming, as the USDA Organic Seal - the king of all certifications - takes upwards of three years to verify due to numerous independent tests along with random USDA inspections. Once certification is achieved, producers are required to have independent tests run on their ingredients several times a year to verify organic integrity.
Whole Foods, as an example, requires all products with organic labeling to not only be subject to the above mentioned testing, but also required products be subject to Whole Foods independent testing. While I agree you can't be 100% certain a product is organic, the people producing the organic ingredients/products stand to lose their livelihoods if they are found to be misrepresenting themselves. With that said, the overwhelming majority of producers that sell organic products tend to be smaller companies that only produce organic products.
The King Sooper's (Kroger) by my house has had these on quite a few items for at least several months now. I usually go through the self checkout, so they're handy since I don't have to look up all the PLUs. Seems like Bananas (4011) are the only things I buy regularly enough to remember. ;)
@henrygates: The definitions are federally regulated in the US. From what I understand, the EU and UK does as well. If you're looking for information pertaining to the US, I recommend 'What To Eat' by Marion Nestle. She gives a good breakdown of the nutritional and legal meanings behind the word, among many other things.
I do eat organic whenever possible, but I buy produce from known sources and several non-perishable grocery companies have earned my trust (such as Annie's Homegrown). I usually research the companies before I start shoveling my hard-earned money into their coffers for your reasons, though. I also tend to avoid buying organic brands owned by subsidiaries of non-organic corporations such as ConAgra, of which there are quite a few. I would not be surprised to hear they are cutting corners as you are both suggesting.
@Julius_Seizure: With that said, the overwhelming majority of producers that sell organic products tend to be smaller companies that only produce organic products.
Unfortunately, not true: [consumerist.com]
@norndag: Read an article about that in USA today a few months ago and norndag nailed it.
I work at a grocery store and have been seeing these for a few months now. They don't scan with our current hardware/software setup.
It would also help if the registers would be able to read the barcodes - my store's registers jam on those barcodes.
@henwy:
Geez! Lighten up people! I interpreted xrmb's post as a JOKE, as indicated by the emoticon smiley.
Now 'Twatwaffle' - I have to add that one to my repertoire!
"bites into our profit margins"
Boo Hoo, .40 extra cents for HYPE.
@formatc: My comment is 100% accurate. All you did was link me to a list of the largest food producers and the organic brands they market. If you were to look at all the brands of organic foods available to consumers in the U.S., you would see that the brands in the link represent a very small percentage of what's available. On top of that, out of the many products available by the brands listed in your link, most are conventional, not organic.
Odwalla, for example, has only a small number of organic products available out of the many products they market. The same goes for Kashi - some of the ingredients in Kashi's foods are organic, but few of their products are 100% organic. I don't recall any of their cereals being organic.
With that said, there's a giant difference between a product being 100% organic and products made with organic ingredients. Many of the organic producers on the market make products that are 100% organic, unlike many of the major labels that hedge their bets by only producing foods with SOME organic ingredients. You can advertise a product as organic if it has organic ingredients, but the % of ingredients that are organic has to be labeled.
@computerwiz3491: honestly? it's because working at a supermarket, checkers know the codes better than reflexively scanning. I think the problems of organic and inorganic (space fruit!) code distinctions is being vastly exaggerated. Literally, you add a 9 in front of the regular code to do organics, and they always have some sort of identifier. and beyond that you can look at the customer and see whether the produce is likely to be organic. a 40 year old woman with three reusable bags in hand is more likely to be buying organic than a little Mexican lady with three kids. Plenty of cues.
@norndag: It's going to be RFID scanning everything at once. I long for the day when I dont have to stand in line after the person with the 12 cartfulls of groceries.
Looks like we have some organic industry people here on the comments.
I have one for ya organics producers, you sell a tomato that tastes as good as the ones I grow in my garden and I'll gladly pay you extra for that.
Heck pretty much any homegrown veggie beats what you can buy in the flavor department.
Fix on that and you'll own the marketplace.
oops,
Looking at that it kind of feels like I'm being snarky with the "organic industry" phrasing. That's not what I meant, I just meant to include everyone from growers to sellers.
sorry.
Maybe this will also help self-checkout lines move faster - I've been stuck behind people who stare puzzled at the touchscreen when checking out the vegetables, as if they can't grasp that "onion" comes after "apple" in the alphabet.