GS1 Canada is pleased to bring you the April edition of the Food for Thought newsletter. With every edition, we will bring you the latest insights, news and trends.
We are here to support our community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Please contact us if you have any concerns, questions or needs.
As the global implications of COVID-19 continue to evolve, ensuring the health and well-being of our employees, while continuing to support our subscribers, is our priority.
The availability of food and supplies to Canadian consumers has never been more important, and we have undertaken significant measures to protect our staff and ensure continued support to the industries’ supply chains.
As industry partners, GS1 Canada is committed to providing uninterrupted access to product data through ECCnet and providing continued access to the services that our subscribers rely on, including ongoing product image and data capture services in Montreal, to help ensure products continue to get to market and to the customers. We additionally provide our subscribers with best practice recommendations to help facilitate streamlined business operations and processes during these challenging times.
Act Now! Steps for Business Continuity:
We continue to take direction from the government, Health Canada and public health agencies and will adjust our plans accordingly. If we can do anything to support you during this time, please call us at 1.800.567.7084, or email us at info@gs1ca.org.
Check out our full-page feature on GS1 Canada’s ECCnet Nutritional Content Solution in the January/February issue of Grocery Business Magazine.
As shoppers demand more transparency about the products they buy and consume, brand owners and retailers alike can leverage GS1 Canada’s ECCnet Nutritional Content solution to meet these evolving consumer needs.
The theme was carried onto GS1 Canada’s presentation at CHFA West 2020, the hub of knowledge in the Natural Health Products and Organic industry. We are proud to have been one of the 900 exhibitors. At the tradeshow, we shared our knowledge about nutritional content and explained how GS1 Canada can help businesses grow across the foodservice and grocery industries.
To improve your experience reviewing and certifying your product data in Product Certification, we’ve made enhancements that will provide a faster and more intuitive certification workflow. Here are some of the improvements we have made to this tool:
Improved searchability across Search product and Archive screens
To save you time we’ve organized the search pages by version date to ensure you’re always looking at the most current records first. You can now archive your discontinued products all at once because we added a Discontinue date filter to the Archive screen. For those of you with multiple catalogues, the Archive screen now has an added filter for “GLN” so you can filter based on a single catalogue.
Partial Save capability added to product view pages
You can now partially save all product view pages, except those with validation errors, by clicking on the new Save All button. This new functionality saves you time and means you won’t lose your progress when working on your product catalogue.
Ability to rotate images and open image in new window
We’ve updated the interface so you can rotate images to make it easier to read labels. The product image can also be opened in a new window for side-by-side comparisons.
Rejection comments are now available in status history
Now you can access rejection comments in the Status History page, in addition to the rejection reason, which allows you to see the history of actions taken on each product.
Product Certification is a standardized data excellence tool enabling you to efficiently certify Nutritional, eCommerce and Pharmaceutical content in one place, for one annual certification fee.
To ensure you have the best user experience, we will continue to focus on your feedback to bring you ongoing product improvements. Learn more about Product Certification now.
The GS1 Canada team returned home from the 2020 GS1 Global Forum event in Brussels with the Power of GS1 Award!
At the annual GS1 Global Forum, participants from GS1 organizations from around the world come together to share the key initiatives and innovations they are working on in their home countries. This is an inspiring event which offers the unique opportunity to hear about standards, solutions and innovation initiatives through the lens of peers from different parts of the world. This year, about 900 attendees from 89 GS1 member organizations attended the GS1 Global Forum.
Out of all the exhibitor countries, Canada was among the three who received the Power of GS1 Canada Award. GS1 Canada was recognized for providing a highly educational and interactive experience that allowed participants to learn more about the role of global standards in the launch of cannabis as a new category in Canada.
We send a big heartfelt congratulations to GS1 Kenya and GS1 Latin America on their Power of GS1 Award!
Learn more about GS1 Global Forum 2020.
GS1 Canada is pleased to welcome three new data recipients: Calgary Co-operative Association Limited, The Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux of Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, and Giant Tiger.
Owned by members, Calgary Co-operative Association Limited (Calgary Co-op) is one of the largest retail co-operatives in North America. With locations in Calgary, Airdrie, Cochrane, High River, Okotoks and Strathmore, their portfolio includes food centres, pharmacies, gas stations, car washes, commercial cardlocks, home health care centres, wine, spirits and beer locations, as well as a new cannabis business.
The Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux of Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean (CIUSS du Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean) is one of the province of Quebec’s 34 healthcare organizations.
Specifically, the CIUSS du Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean was appointed by Quebec’s Ministère de la Santé et des services sociaux (Quebec’s ministry of social services) to monitor the data standardization of all products sourced by the 34 organizations of its network with its suppliers: medical and surgical supplies, as well as food products and general merchandise.
Giant Tiger is the leading Canadian owned family discount store, providing on-trend family fashions, groceries, and everyday needs at low prices that Canadians have come to love and expect. Giant Tiger is a proudly Canadian family discount store with over 250 convenient locations in many Canadian communities. Across Canada, stores operate under the trade names of Giant Tiger, Tigre Géant, GTXpress and Scott’s Discount.
TrueSource™ Dashboard is a standardized industry data excellence tool that enables people across your organization to track product metrics for any GS1 Canada Industry Managed Solution (IMS) you are engaged in from a centralized easy-to-navigate place.
Visible to both data providers and data recipients, TrueSource™ Dashboard creates transparency to the status of product content in the registry, enabling all trading partners to drive data excellence.
We are excited to share that the following trading partner has recently joined TrueSource™ Dashboard as a Data Recipient:
Ministère de l'Agriculture, des Pêcheries et de l'Alimentation (MAPAQ) is a government department in the Canadian province of Quebec. Their mission is defined as "Promoting the prosperity of the bio-food sector and ensuring food quality from a sustainable development perspective." MAPAQ is both a leader and a partner, contributing to the prosperity and diversity of Quebec's bio-food industry.
Access TrueSource™ Dashboard under the My Tools section of your myGS1 landing page.
To learn more and view the full list of data recipients currently using this tool, visit the TrueSource™ Dashboard webpage.
Name: Lauren Bourbeau
Position: Manager, Industry Support Services
Years at GS1 Canada: 5.5 years
Before joining GS1 Canada, Lauren was a Day Program Instructor and Residential Counsellor working with adults with disabilities. She studied Psychology at York University and Behavioural Science at George Brown College.
As the Manager of Industry Support Services, Lauren is responsible for supporting and managing her team, reviewing and responding to subscriber emails and calls, collaborating with other departments across the organization on special projects and facilitating training and learning opportunities for her team. Lauren gives 100% every single day - she makes sure that she is always there to support her team, colleagues and subscribers, she sees to it that global standards are being met and she is committed to improving the GS1 Canada subscriber experience.
Lauren loves how much she has learned since joining GS1 Canada. She is especially proud of the strides she has made in public speaking as a result of her participation in Toastmasters.
Lauren’s favourite things include snacking on pizza and ketchup-flavoured chips, going to concerts, traveling to warm climates, spending time with family and friends and the colour teal. Her biggest inspiration is her daughter, who she hopes will one day say that she looks up to her mom.
The past 10 years has witnessed a rapid pace of change in consumer needs, product innovation, corporate actions and society. With the dawn of a new decade, we are also expecting shifts in the foodservice industry. Experts at Mintel Food & Drink (Mintel) have identified three key opportunities for the global food, drink, and foodservice industries to act upon in the next 10 years.
Change, Incorporated
Jenny Zegler, Associate Director at Mintel, believes that the companies that will win in the next decade will be those that take action and improve societal issues such as environmental issues, ethical business practices, public health and other important causes. Consumers will be looking for eco-friendly packaging and products, as well as guidance on how to make their diets more sustainable.
Smart Diets
Through 2030, more consumers will understand their unique biological needs and how to address every aspect of their health through more widespread access to tests and data-collecting technology. Big data and biological tests will enable people to modify their diets and lifestyles to improve their brain health, states of mind, and moods. Thus, brands will have to develop agile production systems that are more flexible and involve technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence), Nutritional Assistant and 3D Printing to meet the demands of personalisation and provide consumers with hyper-individualised products and services.
High-tech Harvests
As technology continues to transform the food supply chain to help boost yields and combat climate change, indoor and lab-grown farming have come to be accepted as nature-identical alternatives and are positioned as more ethical, cost-effective and efficient than naturally sourced options. Transparency will be key to building trust with consumers and champion the people behind the food, regardless of whether it is grown in a laboratory or a field.
Read more about the Mintel’s 2030 Food and Drink Trends report and plan for your business for the future.
Based on subscriber feedback, we are continually enhancing and improving our tools and solutions.
Upcoming enhancements include:
To learn more, visit the Coming Enhancements webpage.
Feedback and input from our users, including ongoing review of attributes and solution requirements, are key elements in ensuring solutions continue to deliver value to subscribers and meet the needs of industry.
Every GS1 Canada subscriber has an opportunity to represent industry interests through active participation in a community work group.
Visit www.gs1ca.org/work-with-industry for more information.
Tell us what you think about the 'Food for Thought' newsletter, our solutions and anything GS1 Canada related at feedback@gs1ca.org.
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