Following Kezzler’s acquisition of smart packaging and QR code pioneer Scanbuy, we’re creating an all-in-one platform for product transparency, traceability, and consumer interaction. Here’s what they shared…
Q: If you could explain to a five-year-old what it is that you do, what would you say?
Per Christian: In Kezzler, what we do essentially is put small markings on products and boxes and then follow the product. Let’s say peanut butter as an example – from the peanut butter farm to the shop. If someone wants to know what happened to the peanut butter before it was sold, we can tell them that. To be a bit technical, you can imagine that we are collecting this data from various computers around the company.
Didier: To a five-year-old, I would say that we help people, like their parents, access a lot of useful information, very quickly, about a product before they decide to buy it or use it.
Q: What are some of the biggest wins you see from Kezzler’s acquisition of Scanbuy?
Per Christian: In Kezzler, we have a strong offering in product and batch traceability based on a unique digital ID technology that we have developed. With the acquisition of Scanbuy, we complete the offering with a market-leading solution for smart packaging and on-product consumer engagement. The strongest win is that we’re able to, at an enterprise scale, follow the product end-to-end or from the farm to the fork, to use a well-known food analogy.
As an example, the possibility to enrich smart label experiences with traceability on a batch lot level will give many benefits to any stakeholder interacting with the products. There are already around 100,000 product lines with smart labels in the US alone. That is an amazing starting point for companies to build more engaging product experiences around transparency and traceability.
Didier: The two companies complement each other very well. We are both dealing in information, handling large volumes of data, and speed is crucial for both of us. We also work with similar customers, but Scanbuy’s service is more designed around the consumer experience. The consumer scans a QR code, is sent to a page to access information, and consumes details about the product.
With Kezzler, we can provide a much deeper and richer experience to the consumer and a better service to the companies that are manufacturing and selling those products.
Q: What are you most excited about when it comes to integrating Scanbuy’s technology with Kezzler’s platform? Are there specific customer needs you hope to address?
Didier: We are increasingly building and maintaining content for CPG companies, but the information the consumer is accessing on the packaging today is somewhat limited to what’s already on the package.
With Kezzler’s services, we can access a lot more additional information about a product’s journey – its ingredients, manufacturing details, distribution, and even recycling information. And that’s important in case there’s a product recall. This data is already available within our CPG customer but is scattered across different sources, making it difficult to provide to the consumer. With Kezzler, we can unify and streamline this process.
Q: How will this acquisition directly impact existing Kezzler and Scanbuy customers? What new opportunities will this open for them?
Per Christian: First of all, both companies will continue developing and innovating their existing products at full speed. Moving forward, as a joint team, we aim to accelerate the rate of innovation by combining our experience, we have highly competent people both on the product management side and engineering teams.
The first major opportunity is offering existing Scanbuy and Kezzler customers a complete product traceability and disclosure solution from a one-stop shop.
Another key benefit is helping customers break down internal silos and sharing data that historically has been siloed from different teams. For instance, operations teams collect data that marketing teams can integrate into their programs. There’s a lot of opportunity and potential for collaboration and efficiency.
Didier: We don’t necessarily have the same customers, so this allows us to extend services to each other’s customers. There are many portfolio and geography synergies.
If you take a broad brush, Scanbuy is strong on food and beverage in North America but not as active in Europe or Asia, where Kezzler has a stronger presence. But more interestingly, when we talk to the same companies – and we do talk to the same companies for a few of our customers –we don’t tend to talk to the same people because we’re addressing different needs. The people we talk to want to do different things. They want to track, they want to authenticate, they want to document, or they want to engage with the consumer and be transparent with the consumer.
But to do that, they all need some marker, some ID, really anything on the product to be able to identify the product that the consumer is seeing or to identify the product that is moving from one place to another. And everybody is competing to have some space on the packaging of the product. There’s limited real estate on a package, you will have sales, marketing, and regulation trying to get the larger space on the artwork. Quite often, we’re left with a tiny space, as small as a penny, a square inch at the most.
By combining our technologies, we can make that tiny square – whether a QR code or another marker – work harder and serve multiple functions. With our technology we’re trying to turbocharge it.
Q: What trends do you see in traceability and smart packaging, and how will this acquisition position you to address them?
Per Christian: There’s a strong push coming from consumers and governments for greater transparency and traceability.
In the US, Smart Label started in 2015, and in the EU, the Digital Product Passport (DPP) initiative is set to take effect in 2027-28, covering all non-food products. We expect to see some cross-pollination between these initiatives, where the EU might open to Smart Label-like solutions for food, and I would not be surprised if the US started to look at the EU’s Digital Product Passports. The commonality is that both require consumer interaction, and this is something that Scanbuy has addressed very successfully in the US.
Didier: Industry-wide movements like the transition to 2D barcodes with Sunrise 2027, mandates like FSMA for batch tracking in the US and DPP, they’re all pushing in the same direction. It’s more information, more precise, more detailed information, and information delivered at a much faster pace. So, combining Kezzler and Scanbuy seems natural.
The GS1 digital link alone would make that association unavoidable in a way as all the information that will be available inside the QR code is what both Kezzler and Scanbuy will need to deliver all our services. In a way, this Kezzler and Scanbuy association was predestined.
Q: Fast forward five years – what impact do you see this integrated platform having on supply chain visibility and product authentication?
Didier: A lot can happen in five years but for me the big picture would be richer, deeper, unit-level information about a product’s journey – from its inception, through all its components and production steps, all the way to its end of life, including recycling. For me, that would be the big picture. Rather, a very wide, very large, but extremely detailed view about the product journey from the beginning to the end.
Q: What are the biggest challenges right now, and how are you addressing them?
Per Christian: The most common challenge that we see across our customers today is the collecting and sharing of data at scale in very complex value chains. Whether it’s to generate a report for governments – let’s say a recall – FSMA 204 situation or it’s about presenting the information in a consistent way to consumers or wanting to analyze the business processes.
In all of these use cases, the essential part is to be able to collect unstructured data in an efficient way. We see time and time again that this data might be on whiteboards, or other data points may be in a spreadsheet or perhaps on packaging designs. There is stuff hidden in multiple places and often within siloed execution systems somewhere.
This is a challenge where both Kezzler and Scanbuy has a lot of experience in – getting that information out from these different places and then storing it in one uniform and easy to share fashion.
Didier: Like Kezzler, we see information is still managed in silos. At Scanbuy, we only access one of the silos or two at the most.
Product information that we are providing to consumers is still at the SKU level or, in many cases, at the SKU and the consumer product variant level (CPV), which can also include some specific features or minor change in the formula. But that is not enough, or at least not enough anymore, because with FSMA, the batch becomes a new standard.
And the information that will need to be provided to consumers and regulators will have to be provided at the batch level. Today it is a batch, but maybe the day after tomorrow it could become the unit and each item will have to be serialized.
I believe that with Kezzler this challenge will be easier and faster to address for us because we will have the ability to manage and to get access to more information, providing a better set of services to both the consumers and the CPG companies.
Q: What emerging technologies are you most excited about, and how will they impact supply chains?
Per Christian: AI is going to be a game-changer. We’re already working with large language models and retrieval-augmented generation.
Customers have massive structured datasets, and AI will help extract valuable insights from them, transforming compliance-driven data collection into strategic business intelligence. It’s not only going to help in using the data to meet government requirements or consumer requirements, but also revolutionize how these data sets are used.
Imagine a combination of product data, batch data, sourcing data, maybe manufacturing, and logistics events. And on top of that, the consumers interacting with the product. If you have all of that data in one place and standardized formats, I think the opportunities are endless.
In turn, our customers will be able to build better products because they know more and operate more efficiently because they really understand how things move in their value chain. And, of course, they’ll also be able to provide much better consumer experiences, too.
The key to all of this is basically to turn data into insights, and that’s where AI comes in.
Didier: AI will be crucial for processing and sharing data efficiently. As more and more data is becoming available, it’s important to be able to make sense of all that data, to create content in a better and more efficient way, and show what is relevant, highlighting what is critical to you.
And most importantly, make new data available faster both up and down the stream to everyone – not only from the manufacturers to the consumers, but also from the consumers to the manufacturers and to all the participants in the ecosystem along the way. I think AI will be a huge accelerator to provide better service and make sure that the information is shared in a very efficient and secure way.
Summary
As regulations around supply chain visibility tighten – think the EU’s Digital Product Passport and the US FSMA 204 – this partnership is set to help brands stay ahead of the curve. More than just compliance, this is about making supply chains smarter, packaging more interactive, and consumer engagement seamless. With Scanbuy’s strong presence in North America and Kezzler’s cutting-edge traceability solutions, the opportunities for businesses are huge.
If this conversation has sparked your curiosity, there’s plenty more to explore. Kezzler and Scanbuy are at the forefront of transforming how brands approach transparency, traceability, and consumer engagement. Whether you’re looking to enhance supply chain visibility, meet evolving regulations, or create smarter consumer experiences, this acquisition is opening doors to new possibilities.
To find out more about how Kezzler can help your business navigate the future of digital product experiences, get in touch today.