The Digital Product Passport and GS1 standards.A passport is only as good as its foundation.
We build the Digital Product Passport on the open standards of GS1. That makes it readable by everyone who needs it: suppliers, retailers, regulators and your customers.
A Digital Product Passport gathers information about a product: origin, materials, reparability, certificates. For that information to be worth anything, it has to be read and understood across company and national borders. That is exactly what the GS1 standards deliver. They are the foundation that makes a product passport work, instead of leaving it as an isolated data attachment.
One shared standard.So everyone reads the same thing.
A product passport that every company builds differently helps no one. The supplier would write it in one way and the retailer would read it another. The regulator would check it one way and the consumer would scan it another. Every connection would need its own translation.
GS1 standards solve that because they are the same worldwide. A product is identified the same way everywhere, and a piece of information is understood the same way everywhere. Building on GS1 means you are not tied to a single vendor, or to a format that nobody will be able to read later. The data stays open, interoperable and easy to connect, even across system boundaries.
What a standards-conformant passport is made of.Five building blocks from GS1.
GTIN
The globally unique product identifier. It leaves no doubt about which product is meant, no matter who is asking.
GS1 Digital Link
The address of the product passport: a structured web address, encoded in the barcode or QR code. Unlike a QR code that holds an ordinary link, it can lead to different information depending on the context.
GS1 Conformant Resolver
The layer that resolves a Digital Link address to the matching data. It decides what information a scan returns.
Visibility Events (EPCIS 2.0)
The events along the supply chain: what happened to which product, where and when. They make the product passport more than a snapshot: it becomes a traceable path.
GS1 Web Vocabulary
The shared meaning. It defines what a data field means, so that “organic certificate” and “Bio-Zertifikat” are recognised as the same thing, by people and by systems alike.
We implement these standards.And help develop them further.
benelog develops and operates a GS1 Conformant Resolver and OpenEPCIS, a standards-conformant implementation of EPCIS 2.0. We implement the GS1 building blocks that a product passport relies on in one integrated platform.
Sven Böckelmann, Tech Lead at benelog, co-chairs the GS1 GSMP Visibility Standards Maintenance Group. So we do more than use the standards: we help shape them. We know first-hand what the working groups decide, and what we build is up to date.
Not a concept.A passport you can scan.
You can see what a standards-conformant product passport looks like in two real examples: an industrial battery module and an outdoor jacket. Both carry a GS1 Digital Link, and both open in seconds. Scan them yourself.
Let's talk about your product passport
You now know what a standards-conformant product passport is built on. The best way to find out which building blocks your products need, and where to start, is to talk it through with us.