For half a century consumers have become quite familiar with barcodes at the check-out counter as they purchase everything from groceries to high-end luxury items. The “picket fence-like” codes help merchants maintain local inventory and re-order requests, product identification, prices, lot numbers, etc.

Barcodes have served global commerce well over the period but GS1, the organization that oversees global standards for the system, says their days are likely numbered – a development that holds great promise for transactions dealing with food and fiber and a buying public that is eager to know more about the products it wears and eats for dinner.

Anne Godfrey, chief executive of GS1 UK recently told the Daily Mail nearly half of British retailers have already updated their check-out stations to accommodate the more capable “QR” (quick response) codes that replace the lines of a bar code with a maze-like square of much more capable and precision digital designs.

“Increasingly, QR codes that bring up multiple bits of product information and even embedded videos are appearing on the packaging of many products,” she explains. “Very soon we will say goodbye to the old-fashioned barcode and every product will just have one QR code that holds all the information you need.”

Logistics experts at Toyota pioneered the use of the strange-looking QR code to boost efficiency of “just in time” (JIT) parts delivery from its warehouses to workers on its assembly lines more than 20 years ago. It wasn’t long, however, before marketers began seeing the QR code’s potential and it became a portal to product information ranging from interactive museum exhibits and new-product expositions to product registration sites and drug and chemical labels.

Where the barcode can only contain 7 specific categories of information such as price, lot size, weight, color, price, etc., a QR code has exponentially more depth to the information it can link for the merchant and the consumer.

With a consuming public demanding more traceability for finished food and fiber goods, the QR code offers an already-accepted avenue to “click for more information” — and that’s a good thing for farm producers who have data readily available to provide for traceability of their products.

The information included for consumers conceivably could allow ag producers to verify what farming methods and crop protection tools were used in grain and livestock production. Similarly, the codes will increasingly be valuable tools in production records required by regulators.

That’s tremendous technological development for a tool I first encountered as a “product description guide portal” at the launch of a new Versatile tractor years ago.