Management

Digimarc today unveiled its new Digimarc Barcode for Thermal Labels. Retail thermal labels with Digimarc Barcode scan even when ripped, creased, smudged or damaged, making checkout faster and easier for both customers and cashiers. Digimarc Barcode for Thermal Labels additionally encode GS1 Application Identifiers (AIs) for fresh foods, allowing retailers to dynamically adjust pricing on soon-to-be-expired fresh foods or sell items at a discount, instead of discarding them as shrink.

“The recent Harris Poll data confirms what the industry has known anecdotally for years, and that’s the inefficiencies of fresh food labels,” said Bruce Davis, chief executive officer, Digimarc. “Digimarc Barcode for Thermal Labels address this problem head-on by providing a seamless and efficient solution from the fresh food counter to the front-of-store at checkout.”

Digimarc delivers a complete solution in conjunction with leading retail scale and POS (Point-of-Sale) scanning manufacturers. Together, these firms account for more than 80 percent of thermal labels printed in the retail perimeter departments. Digimarc Barcode for Thermal Labels can be reliably and efficiently scanned at the front of the store by Digimarc-capable models of POS scanners from leading manufacturers, including Datalogic, Honeywell, NCR and Zebra. Digimarc will be showcasing this solution with their printing and scanning partners in booth #2875 at NRF 2018 on January 14-16.

A new Harris Poll survey reveals cashiers find damaged thermal labels difficult to scan because of problems like wrinkles, moisture or poor placement on food items. Seventy-six percent of cashiers experience a label not reading from the meat/seafood department at least once per shift. Ninety percent strongly agreed that reducing hard-to-scan thermal labels would improve their productivity. The new Digimarc Barcode for Thermal Labels addresses these problems by making scanning easier and more reliable.

Digimarc Barcode is repeated multiple times across the surface of a label. This broad label coverage provides scanners and mobile devices with a larger and more reliable scanning surface than a label with a traditional barcode. Retailers also have an opportunity to engage consumers by making it easy for shoppers to scan a label with their mobile phones to access coupons, recipes and videos.