Desperate Need for Cannabis Label Standardization
This industry has an enormous labeling problem. Nobody agrees on a format, nobody agrees on a layout, nobody agrees on required data, nobody agrees on digital-imaging. How the heck is this industry supposed to grow rapidly, while this heavy weight of inconsistency and incompatibility slows us down.
# Back today we had just 5 track producing labels for both itself as a supply side and avery till 5 software that work okay it was once of world way through all want this is the way live in washington we have a couple different places in ball with creation of the labels and a couple different plaza mall with regards to the retail siding scanning the labels we started to see some problems season consistency sad different types of post reducing the labels was slightly different format see there a prefix on the tag on the davidson coated 45 differences in terms of what character set david and decided to code with us we were mostly using c 128 barcodes at the time but some were using a fancy 128 a c 120 a_b_c 128 c n n we have a key code in problem where not all the scanners understand all of those formats properly maybe the software that receiving encoder data doesn't understand that information set properly and we start having you know some small 9 problems is just the beginning
additionally cannabis industry unlike everywhere else does not have an agreed-upon label format or an agreed-upon label layout by format I simply mean the size and shape of the of the label 2 inch by 1 inch or so forth and then 4 layout we mean what information is included on the label where it's included on the label and the specifications for representing that data for example the weight of the products should be described uniformly across everybody's packaging and today it is not.
not a problem that exists is regard to the digital the scanners that are involved when it comes to reading these label formats in the barcode or QR code that's included on the label not all those software not all of the systems have a hardware scanner that is capable of reading 2D images such as QR code which sort of puts us in the spot where the de-facto standard now has to just be a 1D image and that currently is against e128
and of course all of these different you know printing variations and format variations scanner hardware variations also land on variations of software on the retail side that ultimately needs to scan this label for checkout at the point of sale there's no product identifier like included in other industries so they can't have a common scold that code that they scan over and over the software may or may not be able to read the barcode or QR code that's printed on the packaging without. Maybe a pre-flight test and additionally with all the different data that needs to be on the label with regard to trace ability and just general product information we do need to have a standard layout at least for all of these labels.