Albert Heijn and Automatic Markdowns
Loblaw's and Fresh Produce Management
Deen Supermarkets gain insights in to flower sales
Japan manages Sushi freshness by the hour

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Albert Heijn launched a trial for automatic markdowns using GS1 DataBar.

During the trial, the products in the Poultry department had two prices: the regular price of the product and the announcement of the markdown on the day of the recommended sell-by date. The customer directly sees what the discount is and when that discount will be calculated at checkout.

The GS1 DataBar encodes the sell-by-date so the cashier only needs to scan the product rather than stop to physically look at the date, creating a much more efficient process at the checkout.

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Loblaw's Canada experiences vast benefits from GS1 DataBar for Fresh Produce Management

Canada’s largest retailer, Loblaw Companies Limited, implemented a limited use of the GS1 DataBar back in 2007, with specific suppliers of apples and bananas. After this initial implementation, Loblaw began to expand its use of the GS1 DataBar to all of its fresh produce. Since making the switch to the GS1 DataBar, Loblaw has experienced vast benefits, including:

• Improved accuracy and speed at the retail POS for fresh produce
• Improved accuracy and speed at self-checkouts
• Reduced shrinkage
• Improved stock control by better differentiation of organic and conventional produce
• More accurate product replenishment
• Improved supplier identification

Cashiers found the new barcodes to be a vast improvement to manual entry, and also discovered that the produce bags did not impair the ability to read the DataBar labels.

Loblaw themselves found traceability of their fresh produce to be greatly enhanced after the implementation, bringing supply chain efficiency to the forefront of their operations.

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GS1 DataBar and Production dates gives Deen Supermarkets (NL) insight in to flower sales

Deen Supermarkets - voted best flower market in 2010 in the Netherlands - has been using GS1 DataBar on their flowers and plants since October.

Encoded in the GS1 DataBar is the item code and production date. This provides insight into what party the item was purchased from and how long it has been in the store.

Using POS data, Deen now gets insight into what exactly kind of flowers are sold and when. Previously, there was only information available about what had been purchased.

When Deen decided to modernise its production for flowers and plants, they also wanted to include a barcode. In August 2010, all 350 check-outs in all 61 Deen supermarkets were upgraded to scan GS1 DataBar.

Deen wants to use the production date information for the following purposes:
- Consider consumer preferences such as types and colour
- Insight into depreciation (wastage): it now becomes clear what was actually sold
- Better ordering with information on types, consumer preferences and depreciation
- Assortment choice by comparing each store sales in different stores
- Preventing errors from manual pricing

Deen expects to announce the results of its pilot shortly after Q1 2011.

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Japan manages sushi freshness by the hour using GS1 DataBar

In Japan consumers are generally frequent food shoppers and are therefore very particular about freshness and quality of fresh produce. As a result, retailers have been encoding additional data, such as expiry dates, in bar codes for some years, often using different carriers such as GS1-128 or additional EAN-13 symbols.

In 2008, two leading Japanese retailers, Bunkado and Beisia, conducted GS1 DataBar pilots to take advantage of its ability to encode additional data such as expiry dates and hours in a single bar code symbol using the existing GS1 Application Identifier (AI) standard. During the pilot, staff prepared take-away meals in-store with lunch boxes and side dishes such as sushi and sashimi prepared two or three times a day. Many of the items had a short shelf life with some kept for less than 24 hours. The freshness of the products were checked regularly so that discounts could be given to products that were approaching the end of their shelf life in order to promote sales. This discounts were done by printing and applying a new GS1 DataBar Expanded label to the product. The discount information, either as a percentage or fixed amount, was encoded into the symbol. Cashiers were then able to scan the discounted product quickly and accurately at POS instead of manually keying in the information.

Following the success of the trial, Bunkado and Beisia have started implementing a similar mark-down process using GS1 DataBar on other products, such as milk, yogurt and tofu (products with relatively short-shelf lives).