You may have heard that the barcode is changing. Sunrise 2027 is the name GS1 gives to an industry push to get retail point-of-sale systems ready to read 2D barcodes — a QR code carrying a GS1 Digital Link, or a GS1 DataMatrix — alongside the linear barcode that has been on packs for fifty years. Here is what that actually means, said plainly.
What Sunrise 2027 is
It is a readiness milestone, not a law. GS1 is asking retailers to make sure their checkout scanners can read and process a 2D barcode — at minimum, pull the GTIN out of it — by 2027. GS1 US frames it as a “Crawl-Walk-Run” transition and is explicit that you do not have to implement everything by that date. Source: GS1 US, Sunrise 2027, reviewed July 2026.
What it is not
- It is not a deadline that switches off your existing barcode. During the transition, packs carry both a 1D and a 2D code, so tills that have not been upgraded keep working.
- It is not a checkout that calls a website. At the till, the scanner reads the GTIN out of the code on the device — no network call to any resolver. The web experience (opening a product page from the same code) is a separate action a shopper’s phone takes later. Your resolver’s setup has no bearing on whether the code scans at a checkout.
- It is not GS1 certifying your software. The 2D formats are open standards. What matters at the till is that the barcode is encoded to the GS1 specification and printed to a readable quality.
Why one code can do both jobs
The reason a single 2D code can serve both the checkout and a shopper’s phone is that it carries the product’s own identifier — the GTIN — in a web address:
https://brand.example/01/09506000134352A checkout reads the 01/GTIN locally for pricing. A phone opens the URL, and a resolver on the brand’s domain decides where to send it — a product page, allergen or ingredient information, a recycling page. That is a GS1 Digital Link, and it is the same code either way.
What to do about it now
If you sell through retail, the practical steps are unglamorous: talk to your GS1 member organisation about the 2D roadmap for your category, keep your linear barcode on pack through the transition, and make sure whatever generates your 2D code encodes it to the GS1 specification. If you also want the code to do something useful when a shopper scans it, that is where a resolver on your own domain comes in — one code, edited without reprinting, pointing wherever you need by purpose.
redireo builds those GS1 Digital Links and runs the resolver on your own domain, and renders both carriers — a QR of the Digital Link and a GS1 DataMatrix. We are careful about the line between marketing and compliance: we do not issue GTINs, we are not a GS1 certification, and a code alone does not make a product compliant with a regulation. What we do is the resolver layer on top of the identifier you already own.