This is big breaking news:

GS1 Hong Kong Wednesday announced the launch of a one-stop product and food quality information portal to address recent food safety incidents… BarcodePlus, the information portal, acts as ‘a window to product quality and safety’, and can be publicly accessed for critical product quality-related information by simply entering the barcode number printed on a product… The information portal will cover everything from a product’s shelf life, country of origin, ingredients and packaging, through to images, certifications and testing reports.

By the way, that’s not from some far-away news outlet. That’s from this story in NetworkWorld which reached my desk about four hours ago. The implications of this news are enormous. Presumably, for now, this is for GS1-compliant barcodes issued by Hong Kong. But can a worldwide online consumer-accessible database, driven by GS1 worldwide, be far behind?