EPCIS technology offers food safety professionals a standardized approach to tracking products throughout the supply chain, enabling precise traceability and rapid response to food safety incidents. By implementing this GS1 standard, food businesses can not only meet regulatory requirements like FSMA 204, but also improve operational efficiency, reduce food waste, and build consumer trust through transparent supply chain documentation.

For a full glossary and guide to GS1 terminology, acronyms, and how they connect to each other, click here.

Understanding EPCIS: A Foundation for Food Traceability

Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) is a global standard developed by GS1, a non-profit organization that maintains standards for supply chain management across industries. At its core, EPCIS provides a standardized framework for capturing and sharing information about the physical movement and status of products as they travel through the supply chain - from production facilities through distribution centers to retail locations.

Unlike traditional traceability systems that might only capture basic transaction data, EPCIS documents real-world events with four critical dimensions of information:

This comprehensive data structure enables unprecedented visibility into product journeys.

For food safety professionals, EPCIS represents more than just a technical standard - it's a powerful tool that connects disparate systems across the supply chain and creates a common language for traceability. With increasing regulatory pressure and consumer demands for transparency, implementing EPCIS can help food businesses maintain compliance while improving their operational capabilities.

How EPCIS Drives Compliance – and Works in Practice

Robust traceability is now table stakes under the FDA’s FSMA 204 which requires companies to record and share Critical Tracking Events (CTEs) - harvest, initial packing, shipping, receiving, transformation, and more - so regulators can pinpoint contamination fast. EPCIS delivers a readymade data model for those events, allowing every partner to exchange the “what, where, when, and why” of a product in a format that meets FSMA 204 record keeping rules and speeds recalls by narrowing them to the affected lots instead of entire shipments.

In day to day operations that same structure keeps information flowing. A grower’s Harvest event (e.g. “Field A lettuce, picked 03 01”) reaches the packer as part of the Initial Packing event message, so lot and field data auto populate without re keying. Later, a distribution center’s Shipping event (e.g. “50 cases yogurt, dispatched 04 10 15:00”) lands in the store’s system the moment the truck arrives, letting the commissary confirm quantities, temperature readings, and shelf life before the pallet is unloaded. By threading these event messages together in real time, EPCIS forms the digital chain of custody regulators require—while giving every stakeholder the same, trustworthy snapshot of each product’s journey.

EDI 856 ASN vs. EPCIS

IT leaders usually have one core question: "Do we keep using the familiar EDI 856 ASN, or move to EPCIS?" Here's how the two stack up in major areas:

Purpose & Scope

Timing

Data Granularity

Technology Stack

Conclusion

As food supply chains grow increasingly complex and regulatory requirements more stringent, EPCIS offers food safety professionals a standardized approach to traceability that supports both compliance and operational excellence. By capturing the what, where, when, and why of product movements, EPCIS creates the transparency needed to ensure food safety while building consumer trust.

For food producers, processors, distributors, and retailers, implementing EPCIS represents an investment not just in regulatory compliance, but in the resilience and efficiency of their entire operation. The detailed visibility into supply chain activities that EPCIS provides enables better decision-making, faster response to problems, and ultimately, safer food for consumers.

As FSMA 204 compliance deadlines approach, food businesses that proactively adopt EPCIS standards will find themselves better positioned not only to meet regulatory requirements but to leverage traceability as a competitive advantage in an increasingly transparency-focused marketplace.