GS1 Sunrise 2027 checklist

By 2027, retailers expect to scan 2D barcodes (QR carrying a GS1 Digital Link) at the till. Here is what a small brand should do.

• Confirm your GS1 company prefix and GTINs are current
• Decide a resolver domain for your Digital Links
• Generate spec-correct GS1 Digital Link QR codes
• Point each code at a destination you can edit later
• Test a printed code on a real phone and a POS scanner
• Plan artwork updates for your next print run

What is GS1 Sunrise 2027?

Sunrise 2027 is the date by which GS1 expects major retailers worldwide to have point-of-sale scanners that can read 2D barcodes — QR codes carrying a GS1 Digital Link — everywhere they currently read a 1D barcode like an EAN-13 or UPC-A. It is not a hard cutover: your existing linear barcodes keep working, and nobody is asking you to reprint packaging overnight. It is a readiness target for scanning infrastructure, so that by 2027 a shopper's phone and a checkout lane can both read the same code.

Why move to a 2D barcode?

A traditional EAN-13 or UPC-A barcode can only carry one thing: the GTIN. A 2D barcode built on a GS1 Digital Link can carry much more — the GTIN plus optional data like batch or lot number, serial number and best-before date — all in a single scan. That extra data is what enables faster recalls, per-unit traceability and richer product information, none of which a 1D barcode has room for.

What stays the same at the till?

Your GTIN does not change. Sunrise 2027 is about the barcode symbol and what it can carry, not about renumbering your product catalogue — a GTIN allocated years ago is still valid, and the check digit and structure a till relies on today keep working exactly as they do now. A GS1 Digital Link QR still scans as that same GTIN at the checkout; what's new is everything it can carry alongside it.

How is this different from a plain URL QR code?

An ordinary QR code pointing at a website is only useful to a phone camera — its contents are an arbitrary link with no structure a barcode scanner can extract data from. A GS1 Digital Link QR code is dual-purpose: it is a real URL, so a shopper's phone opens it as a normal web page, but its path and query string are also built from GS1 Application Identifiers, so a POS scanner can pull out the GTIN, batch and expiry directly and offline, without ever visiting the web address. One code serves both a human on their phone and a till at the register.

Ready to generate and manage your codes? Start free on 2D Ready →