FRIGOSCANDIA Sweden is a leading logistics service provider for the distribution of frozen products in Europe. It currently operates 100 cold stores with a total capacity of 5.5 million m3 in Scandinavia, the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Austria, and Italy. The services they offer to their clients primarily include: warehousing and transport of frozen goods, as well as order picking.
They have been continuously developing their logistics system since the 1950s. In the mid-1980s, it became clear to the company’s management that further effective management of frozen food distribution would be impossible without barcodes. Initially, they decided to introduce an internal system. Their own label with a 7-digit identifier was applied to all transport units received into the warehouse. However, this solution soon proved insufficient, especially in light of the company’s growing operations in European markets. A need arose to encode additional information (such as weight, production batch number, expiration date) and to transmit it electronically. Unfortunately, every FRIGOSCANDIA client wanted to encode and transmit this data in a different way. This would have necessitated maintaining a massive database. At that time, the EAN International Association was already working on a global standard for encoding additional data, based on the UCC/EAN-128 code with Application Identifiers and an information exchange sub-standard compliant with UN/EDIFACT. At FRIGOSCANDIA, a decision was made to halt the development of the existing system and wait for the EAN solution.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2001/3.