Building on
strong foundations
We have adopted ambitious new ways of working, invested profit with purpose and strengthened our networks as we embark on the next chapter of our collaboration with industry.
Powering a world
of possibilities
In our last annual review, we celebrated the 50 years of progress our global standards have enabled. We now look to the future and how the next generation of GS1 standards will once again transform the way people work and live.
We have built on strong foundations and over the course of the past year our organisation has embarked on a significant transition.
We came to the end of our previous three-year strategy, “Growth with purpose”. This has proven transformational for GS1 UK; reaffirming our purpose,
re-invigorating our brand and bringing our values of collaboration, forward thinking, trust and integrity to life.
The sector-neutral approach it delivered provided a robust framework for the development of our new three-year strategy “Powering a world of possibilities.”
Our new strategy is ambitious. Governed by our core principles and built around the global trends and key considerations our plans and solutions are designed to
address, it will keep the informed, protected consumer at the heart of everything we do. It will help us implement more agile ways of working and play to our strengths as a global standards body while making informed choices based on local trends and member feedback.
This year also saw the global transition to QR codes powered by GS1 begin in earnest. Consumers are increasingly demanding more information about the products they buy, and businesses are becoming overwhelmed by new legislative demands as well as the sheer volume of data that comes from multiple sources in different formats. QR codes powered by GS1 have been recognised by industry as the solution to this challenge.
A growing number of large international brands and retailers are already on board. We have made substantial progress on supporting the transition here in the UK, engaging with industry and the media to raise awareness of their potential for powering a safer, more informed, connected future and leveraging new opportunities to accelerate adoption.
We have begun to launch the enhanced core systems that will eventually replace those that have underpinned our proposition for the last 20 years and have placed the greatest focus ever on having the right team in place with a culture that promotes effective change.
As a result, we have succeeded in laying the foundations required to face into a rapidly evolving economic, technological and political landscape. GS1 UK is now powered by 85 staff members, over 59,000 satisfied members, powerful partnerships, growing industry influence and increasing resources.
All of this will be instrumental addressing the significant challenges facing society and the industries we support.
Anne Godfrey
CEO, GS1 UK
Sustaining membership
UK PLC continues to battle a range of challenges, from political uncertainty and supply chain disruption to rising costs and falling consumer confidence. In response we have focussed on supporting our members with the
best-in-class standards and services.
By focusing our activities on the barriers most heavily impacting our members, we have sustained our membership throughout some of the most difficult economic conditions seen in decades.
59,496
total
membership
at year end
12,579
total
new joiners
at year end
0.4%
net growth
71.5
NPS
Member trends
Key sectors driving membership growth in 2023-24.
Health
& beauty
15%
Home
& garden
14%
Food
& drink
14%
Apparel
8%
Construction
8%
Key sectors of our total membership base in 2023-24.
Food
& drink
17%
Home
& garden
13%
Health
& beauty
12%
Apparel
9%
Construction
9%
Whether online, in store, in a hospital, warehouse, depot or on a construction site, the common language of GS1 standards is powering the three pillars of traceability – the ability to identify, capture and share interoperable data.
By delivering the traceability and data sharing infrastructure that enables businesses and their consumers to make more informed, sustainable and safer choices, we are playing an active role in helping industry adapt, thrive, adopt ambitious new commitments and make demonstratable improvements.
Reasons for joining
Of the more than 12,000 businesses that joined our organisation over the past year, 92 per cent were SMEs compared to 73 per cent of our total membership.
Small and medium sized enterprises account for 99 per cent of the UK business population and employ over 60 per cent of the workforce. They are the backbone of the UK economy and GS1 standards are increasingly supporting their success.
In today’s business climate, SMEs must be innovative, adaptive and entrepreneurially ready. This is reflected by that fact that over 97 per cent of new joiners listed selling direct-to-consumer as their primary reason for becoming a GS1 UK member, with Amazon, eBay, Shopify, TikTok and Alibaba ranking as their top channels for driving growth.
Across our total membership, identifying products, devices, complying with legislation, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Electronic Data Exchange (EDI) remain the top five drivers of standards adoption, further demonstrating their vital role in driving visibility, traceability and movement throughout the supply chain.
Household names than have recently joined our community include:
The value of membership
As a membership organisation, our value proposition must reflect the needs of our diverse membership, delivering relevance by providing the best possible products and services. We spent the past year continually enhancing our proposition.
The structure for this new proposition is now in place. By taking an insight led approach, it will demonstrate the value of membership with improved experiences, will provide us with the agility required to evolve in line with the needs of our members, and support our expansion into new sectors.
We have continued to invest in our insight’s capability, building a new analytics platform that supports more informed choices and have begun the process of implementing a new customer satisfaction measurement framework that will enable us to take broader input on how we shape the future of our organisation.
Raising our voice and visibility
Increasing visibility with key stakeholders and consumers by driving awareness of GS1 UK’s brand,
role and impact.
In the media
We have continued to increase our voice and visibility, re-invigorating our brand and raising our profile with regulators, opinion formers and consumers with a campaign-led approach.
Campaign highlights from the past year include:
At events
Our efforts to raise our voice and visibility have gone beyond media coverage to include
a more strategic approach to events, collaborative marketing with our partners and communities, and an enhanced stakeholder engagement strategy.
This year we have sponsored, participated, hosted and exhibited at 48 events, from conferences and trade shows to summits and webinars.
In government
We have been campaigning on sustainability, patient
safety, and trade and food safety, where our standards
can support the delivery of legislation that works in the
real world.
Through these campaigns, we have engaged with regulators and legislators, across the four nations that want to benefit from the insights we gather from our members and wider GS1 network.
2023 saw us attend both the Labour and Conservative party conferences for the first time, building on the relationships we developed during our previous Natasha’s Law, DRS, and healthcare campaigns. Going forward, attendance will be an annual activity, and we will base our engagement around successful campaigns that demonstrate the power of standards to support regulatory and legislative drivers.
12
consultation responses
18
meetings with
policy makers
1
thought leadership campaign
22%
policy
awareness
Impact
1bn+
media
reach
20%
brand
awareness
11%
favourability
22%
policy
awareness
1.6m
on
advocacy
accelerated
Taming the wild west: how technology can chart a new frontier of social value
An insight report by GS1 UK and DEMOS
We have partnered with leading cross-party think tank Demos, to create a comprehensive picture of the challenges, opportunities and potential solutions associated with achieving a vision for social value.
Powerful partnerships
The role of our partners in extending our reach, driving standards and adoption helping us catalyse positive change has never been more important.
This year, we have renewed our focus on ensuring we have the right partnerships in place, harnessing the power of our global and local networks to share insights, promote new use cases for GS1 standards and find new opportunities for collaboration.
We have deepened our engagement with existing partners and have begun developing a new and improved partner programme that will help to increase and leverage our partner base. This will allow us to bring our standards to life in new ways and more effectively support the transition to QR codes powered by GS1.
At our partner event in London we welcomed 70 attendees from 45 companies, made up of current and prospective partners. The event was an enormous success, presenting a valuable opportunity to introduce our new three-year strategy and drive further conversations.
We also announced a new partnership with TikTok to provide our SME members with exclusive content, guidance and support designed to help them join the 1.5 million UK businesses now trading on TikTok Shop.
Powering a world of possibilities
Our new three-year plan sets out the drivers of change affecting consumers, businesses and society, outlines our solutions and identifies the activities needed to achieve them.
This new strategy will see GS1 UK build a more ambitious, agile organisation that takes a bold, proactive and insight-led approach to tackling the challenges of today and preparing for those of tomorrow.
QR codes powered by GS1:
the second barcode revolution
Since its inception in the 1970s, millions of retailers, brands and manufacturers have collaborated with GS1 to harness the power of the iconic barcode. Today, GS1 is again uniting businesses around the world to prepare for the second barcode revolution – the transition to QR codes powered by GS1.
From consumers and regulators to brand owners and retailers, everyone wants to know more about the products they buy, sell or consume. However, space on-pack is finite, meaning there will always be a limit to the amount of information physical labels can carry.
QR codes powered by GS1 have been identified by industry as the solution to this problem, allowing businesses to connect their products’ unique identity to multiple online sources of enriched, real-time content.
They are now being tested in 48 countries, representing 88 per cent of the world’s GDP. Globally, GS1 aims to ensure a comprehensive rollout by 2027 and many leading household brands including PepsiCo, Walmart, P&G, L'Oréal and Amazon are already onboard.
In the UK, we completed a pilot programme with more than 50 brands, several of whom are now “live on pack”, and are now working with our wider community to accelerate adoption. This includes collaborating with leading UK retailers to prepare for point-of-sale scanning.
As we drive into new sectors, such as construction, we will leverage new opportunities to drive adoption. Our engagement surrounding QR has rapidly gathered pace and has grown more complex as we explore use cases involving dynamic printing, the inclusion of use by dates, batch numbers and more.
We have leveraged our partner network to support technical questions and have facilitated multi-stakeholder meetings, while also steadily increasing the visibility of our QR programme through a combination of media coverage, a targeted marketing strategy and events.
As a result, the UK’s transition to QR codes powered by GS1 continues to gain momentum with Tesco, Unilever and Bayer confirmed as ‘early adopters’ and several other large suppliers and retailers in the discovery phase.
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Supporting industry
We’re proud of the change we continue to drive with UK industries, the support we offer to our members and the power of GS1 standards to create a safer, more informed and sustainable world.
Powering patient safety across the four nations
Earlier this year, we renewed our partnership with NHS England. 50 per cent of NHS trusts in England are now using GS1 standards to enhance patient safety and improve efficiencies. The renewal of this long-term partnership will build on the collaboration that has seen many trusts adopt open standards to uniquely identify every person, product and place.
Our involvement within the New Hospital Programme (NHP) has grown from using Global Location Numbers (GLNs) to identify places within the new infrastructure, delivered from 2027, to discussions on how GS1 standards can support the Smart Hospitals approach and identification of construction materials within the build phase of the programme.
We have continued to promote our patient safety agenda, holding the government to account on delivering on their mandate that all trusts across England should adopt barcode scanning of high-risk medical devices, and have commenced working with the NHS London region to develop a London-wide approach.
We have launched a multi-year programme with Digital Health and Care Wales to produce a standard patient wristband across acute care that enables a positive patient identification and have concluded a new five-year licence agreement with the Department of Health and Social Care Northern Ireland (DHSCNI). Both initiatives will promote use of GS1 standards in electronic patient records.
Culture
We cannot deliver our ambitious plans without a cohesive, informed and aligned team so have made significant investments to our culture. This includes the implementation of an organisational development and learning framework that delivers the strategic capabilities and behaviours required to achieve optimal people performance.
We have initiated the roll out this framework and have been working with every member of our team to closely align performance expectations and development. We have also been developing a new diversity and inclusion framework that will help us bring creative new solutions, different skills and innovative ideas to our members.
Following our 2024 employee engagement survey, we have identified the priority areas we need to focus on and have appointed engagement champions who will work closely with each member of our exec to ensure that any improvements we make are a true reflection of what matters to the team.
Supporting a new charity
After a highly successful four-year partnership with the Honey Pot charity, we looked to identify a new charity for the business to support. Based on a team vote Tourettes Action, a support and research charity working to improve the lives of people living with Tourette syndrome, has been chosen and our team is now working with them on a range of fundraising activities.
Delivering a
data-driven future
Over the past year, businesses large and small have navigated a complex landscape of economic, political, and consumer shifts. We are now at an inflection point in many areas in the UK and the world beyond, where trusted data will become even more important.
GS1 UK has built on the strong foundations laid over the last four years to support our members through these changes, and we are now ready to embark on the next phase of the journey set out in our new three-year plan.
Externally, our profile has risen enormously and our expertise is increasingly recognised by both industry and government. We are now seen as key contributors to critical initiatives such as the Food Data Transparency Partnership, Extended Producer Responsibility, the Medical Devices Register, cross border trade and Digital Product Passports.
In particular, we are seen as critical in the once in a generation transition
from the linear barcode to the two
dimensional QR code that in the last
12 months has moved into the execution stage.
Our growing influence extends beyond the UK; GS1 UK is now frequently consulted on brand and strategy by our global counterparts, supporting 15 global user groups, leading a branded QR code pilot, and contributing to GS1 Global’s approach to healthcare and public policy.
Internally, with digital transformation accelerating globally and the demand for trusted data being at an all-time high, we have strategically invested some of the financial strength built up in the last few years. This investment has been focused on programmes that will better support our members by leveraging the power of communities, technology and data.
The results of these investments will be seen over the next year and, in the medium and longer term, GS1 UK will be in a stronger position to
support our mission to build resilience across complex supply chains and keep people informed and protected.
As we face the challenges and opportunities of a new government at Westminster, our commitment to our members remains steadfast.
The evolving regulatory landscape presents new demands but also chances for improvement. The details of the new Government’s economic, food, environmental, construction and healthcare policies are still being finalised, but your GS1 is connected and our new strategy is designed to help our members not just survive but thrive.
Over the next 12 months, we will focus on strong governance, a cohesive culture, and data-driven decision-making to support our members' success. Our goal is clear: to ensure that businesses are well-equipped to meet new challenges, that consumers remain informed and protected, and that government has access to the trusted data needed to design policies that drive lasting positive change.
Chris Tyas OBE
Chair, GS1 UK
