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To sell cannabis or cannabis-related products in South Africa, licensed producers will need three things:
GS1 global standards serve to uniquely identify companies, products, locations, and their associated data. This standardised data is instrumental in driving essential business processes and communication across the entire value chain.
Users of global standards enjoy several advantages, including:
Ensure brand consistency and interoperability across systems.
Enable products to be tracked and traced as they move through the supply chain.
Minimises repetitive processes and reducing the opportunity for human error.
Reduce the risk of product counterfeiting.
This accelerates the prospects interest and desire to take action.
Licensed producers will need to use GS1 global standards to identify products and enable supply chain traceability.
Reduce the risk of product counterfeiting.
GS1 South Africa consults with provincial cannabis authorities and representatives from the cannabis business community to develop key guidelines on which global standards licensed producers will need to adopt.
Licensed producers should use a GS1 Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) to uniquely identify all of their products and their packaging levels.
When identifying your cannabis products, three mandatory Application Identifiers (AIs) are used to encode into the GS1 barcode.
| Identifier | Application Identifier (AI) | Description |
|---|---|---|
| GTIN | 01 | Identifies the Global Trade Item Number as a GTIN-14 which is a 14-digit number (if the GTIN is less than 14 digits, zeroes fillers are inserted at the beginning of the GTIN). |
| Packaging Date | 13 | Identifies the date when the goods were packaged as determined by the packager. Structure is YYMMDD. |
| Batch / Lot # | 10 | Identifies the batch or lot number of the product which can encode up to 20 alphanumeric characters. |
