Not only do they scan food items in Japan, they want to know what farm the produce came from.
Once you get past the notion that TAGs are only used for advertising, the number of possibilities begins to grow exponentially. For us, one of the more obvious uses for TAGs would be to replace the existing methodologies for handling product expiration dates and recall. If you think about it, much of the current practice is left to chance in many more instances than one would hope. If you happen to hear about a tainted product or a recall, you can take action but in many cases, no direct notification can occur since often there is no link between the producer and consumer. It is that distribution gap thing again. You are left with the 30-second spot on your local news channel.
Consider for a moment the current practice as it pertains to identifying the "best-before-date" of consumables. A system is in place where cryptic codes abound and abbreviations that are often unclear. Notification of a product recall is left to pure chance, albeit most likely meeting any legal requirement for due diligence. Even if you are made aware of some recalls there is often a posting of lot numbers and date ranges that make identification difficult. Granted, the current system is better than what preceded it, which was, nothing. It is about time that we put some simple technologies in place to improve this situation to the benefit of both consumers and manufacturers.
If we apply the technology of TAG to the problem, we can easily eliminate the issue of codes and abbreviations by applying TAG to all goods with expiry dates. As we describe elsewhere, TAG is a reference so when a consumer reads a product's TAG, it could returns a simple yes or no answer. Is it good or is it bad? Has the expiry date passed, yes or no? Is this product recalled - yes or no? For this purpose, the TAG could reference a central repository maintained by a 3rd party, an official source maintained by government or manufacturers and producers could maintain this information in-house.
Specific information could be provided to ensure positive identification of the product or other symbol augmentation could be used. Regardless of the implementation details, the points to consider are the significant advantages that TAG provides in the instant case.
First and foremost, the information returned must be accurate and up to date; resolving any issues with illegibility, misprinting or damaged labels. Being digital, it also presents an opportunity to generate information that can be translated into the user's language. This is a clear benefit and one that could reduce costs to those who serve global markets.
That the information can be modified at any time, means that any corrections or changes can be applied long after a product has departed the warehouse or plant. Previously, such changes to printed packaging would have been logistically impracticable or simply cost prohibitive and not in all cases would the information be revised. However, by replacing this information with TAGs, the cost of such changes is minimal and we would therefore expect that such corrections would meet with far less opposition.
In cases involving production of hundreds or thousands of products with the same grouping (lot numbers, production runs, etc.), the costs would be insignificant because unique TAGs are not required. A plant might produce 10,000 packages of a given product all with the same expiry and hence require only one TAG. Manufacturers and producers who are subject to the requirements must already maintain the information and so once again, there is little additional cost. There would of course be a cost of printing the TAG but since labels with best before dates must current ly be printed, we're really only talking about a format change. Add to that the benefit of being able to change the status in the case that necessitates a product being recalled. Notwithstanding any issue of liability, the direct costs of issuing a recall itself could easily offset the cost of using TAG.
Some may argue that not everyone has the TAG Reader application and while that's true, it's also true that not everyone can read, making the printed advice all but useless. Further, we would argue that of those people that can't read, many still have phones.