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GS1 Canada Supplier Excellence Checklist for Foodservice

How to Optimize Your Active Listings with Your Trading Partners

Follow the steps below to ensure your foodservice distributors, foodservice operators and other trading partners have access to your accurate, standardized product data and images which are required to fuel important business needs.

By completing these requirements, your products will be optimized for successful distribution and promotion in the Foodservice sector.

How GS1 Canada Helps Your Business

We work closely with industry partners to streamline processes like new product listing, menu planning, recipe development and wellness programs through rich nutritional and allergen information.

This enables digital visibility of marketing information, facilitating eCommerce and simplifying product withdrawal and recall processes.

Follow these steps:

Step 1: Become a GS1 Canada Subscriber

A GS1 Canada subscription is the first step towards meeting your trading partners' content requirements for accurate and standardized product information and images.

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Step 2: Identify Your Products

Follow the steps here to assign Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs) to your products and create barcodes with GS1 Canada's Barcode Generator tool.

After your GTINs and barcodes are ready, the next step is to provide your product information.

Step 3: Provide Your Product Data in ProSYNC

  • Log into myGS1 using your login credentials, and open ProSYNC to start entering your product information.

    If you aren’t registered for ProSYNC (data loading tool), start here. Please note that you may require permission from your GS1 Canada administrator, who you can find through the User Management link on your myGS1 page.
  • Input your product data. Add Your Data in ProSYNC (video). Ensure you include the following:
    • Ensure Channel of Distribution includes Foodservice (Canada).
    • When inputting your foodservice data you will be required to load supply chain data, marketing data (features, benefits, preparation instructions) & nutritional/allergen data to meet your trading partners business needs. Data quality of French content loaded is critical so please do not leverage online translation tools.
    • Make sure to enter desired information such as Country of origin, and all Product of Canada claims, including Province of Processing and Province of Packaging.
    • Save and Approve the product information.
    • Contact ECCnetSupport@gs1ca.org for additional assistance, if needed.
  • Publish your product information to your trading partners

Step 4: Get Image Content For Your Foodservice Products

ECCnet Foodservice Images are standardized product images that fulfill Foodservice trading standards and various business needs, which are captured by our professional team. If you haven’t used GS1 Canada’s product photography services before, visit our content capture page.

  • From myGS1, open The Vault.
    If you aren’t registered for The Vault (image distribution tool), start here. Please note that you may require permission from your GS1 Canada administrator, who you can find through the User Management link on your myGS1 page. Note: You must have an ECCnet Registry catalogue before registering for The Vault.
  • Schedule photography through the Content Capture service tool.
    • If your product is sold only in Foodservice, select Foodservice Content for food and non-food product photography.
      If your product is sold in both Retail and Foodservice, select the Retail & Foodservice Bundle. This will ensure we capture images at the case level down, specific to Foodservice requirements, as well as capture images and content for eCommerce, Planogram and Nutritional on the retail item.
    • How to Get Your Product Images
  • You have two options:

    Option 1: Ship your products to GS1 Canada Image Studio OR

    Option 2: For Foodservice images only, send your own product images to GS1 Canada electronically. Your images will be evaluated to ensure they adhere to global standard image requirements. You can review the technical details for submitting your own images for evaluation by accessing the respective Image and Data Capture Options for Foodservice Content, including the Foodservice Images - Standards Guide.
  • When your marketing, planogram or foodservice images are ready, they will be available in The Vault, where you and your trading partners can easily view and download the content they need.
  • If you had selected Retail & Foodservice content capture, please move to Step 5.

Step 5: Certify Your Nutritional and eCommerce Content (Retail products only)

Product Certification enables your retailers, broker-distributors and other trading partners to access your nutritional and eCommerce content through The Vault. Please note that they cannot access your nutritional content until it has been certified. If you aren’t registered for the Product Certification tool, start here.

  • From myGS1, open Product Certification (tool to certify products).
  • After your retail nutritional and eCommerce product content has been captured, it will be ready for you to certify in the Product Certification tool.
  • Add important product information, benefits and other relevant details for retailers, including extended details on allergens, certifications (halal, gluten-free, etc.) and more.

    How to Certify Your Content

Added value - Recommended

Stand out with Enhanced Assets

Enhanced Assets is an added feature in The Vault that enables manufacturers to load additional high-quality digital assets to support marketing, education and consumer engagement.

  • Load your own professional lifestyle, beauty, plated and other custom images and videos to help your trading partners more effectively showcase and promote your products.
  • Learn more and register to Enhanced Assets

TrueSource™ Dashboard to Support Data Excellence

GS1 Canada's TrueSource™ Dashboard is a data excellence tool that provides visibility to the status of your product content within GS1 Canada's services with your trading partners across Canada.

  • To track your level of content readiness and identify potential content gaps in your data and foodservice images based on your trading partner listings, we recommend a regular review of your TrueSource™ Dashboard.
  • Contact ECCnetSupport@gs1ca.org after you have completed your subscription to GS1 Canada to obtain access to TrueSource™ Dashboard from your myGS1 page.