Two University of Rhode Island researchers and a company called SIRA Technologies have teamed up to create temperature-sensitive barcode ink.
The fancy "proprietary thermochromic printing ink, printed in a non-scannable color..emerges to a scannable, deep magenta when activated. It is therefore capable of adding a temperature and shelf-life monitor to any other barcode thus preventing the sale of contaminated food and archiving the incident."
In English, this means that your grocer can't try to kill you/make a buck with expired products because the barcodes will change color and become unscannable. Man, barcodes really might save the world.
One might argue that it's not the retailer's greed that sells expired products, but incompetence. That's part of the reason GS1 is pushing DataBar as an alternative.
ReplyDeleteNice find tho, loved the new info. :)
A brief writeup of DataBar on http://www.barcode-blog.com/?p=3