The register we publish records 188 organisations working on the Digital Product Passport. One of them is GS1, recorded as a standards body with a headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. That single row is accurate about the Global Office and misleading about everything else.

We considered adding each member organisation as its own entry. We decided against it: it would have added more than a hundred rows to a register of DPP suppliers without adding a single supplier anyone can assess. This page exists instead.

What GS1 actually is

GS1 describes itself as operating through local organisations in over 120 countries. Its history page, marking the barcode's fiftieth anniversary, describes GS1 celebrating together with its family of 116 local GS1 Member Organisations. A third page, the year in review, says its services are available in over 120 GS1 Member Organisations globally.

Those three numbers come from GS1's own website and they do not agree with each other. We are recording what each page says rather than picking the one we like, because the discrepancy is itself the point: there is no single authoritative count of GS1 published in an obvious place. What is not in doubt is the shape. GS1 is a federation of national bodies, each a separate legal entity, and the organisation in Brussels sets standards rather than serving companies directly.

The membership is large. GS1 says its members are over a million organisations, and that those members drive what the standards become.

How it got that way

The structure is an accident of history rather than a design. GS1's own timeline records the European Article Numbering Association being established as an international, not-for-profit standards organisation in Brussels, Belgium - a European counterpart to the American UPC. By the start of the millennium GS1 records being present in 90 countries. In 2005 the two merged, creating a single, international organisation with 101 local GS1 Member Organisations. By the barcode's fiftieth anniversary the family had grown to 116.

Each of those member organisations remained what it had been: a national body with its own staff, its own pricing, its own language and its own commercial priorities.

Why this matters for a Digital Product Passport

It matters because of where the passport's identifier comes from.

GS1 Digital Link is the standard that turns a GS1 identifier into a web address, and it is the mechanism underneath a large share of the passports in our register - it is what our resolver check tests. GS1 describes it as the standardised method for encoding identifiers like GS1 GTINs, GLNs and SSCCs, along with batch numbers, serial numbers, expiry dates and more.

At the global level GS1 has published a Digital Product Passport Provisional Standard. Its own description is careful about what it is for: the provisional application standard aims to help GS1 standards users to prepare fulfilment of regulatory requirements regarding identification and data carrier as a means to access DPP data. That is a standard about identification and carriers. It is not a passport, and it does not claim to be.

The guidance a company actually reads is national, and it is uneven. GS1 Sweden publishes a handbook in Swedish for companies wanting to get started with digital product passports in practice - written, in its own words, to help you understand which decisions you need to take without going down into technical detail. GS1 France publishes a DPP page in French stating that from 2027 the DPP becomes mandatory for certain priority sectors: textiles, electronics, batteries, construction. Others publish nothing we could find from their own home page.

Your GTIN, your resolver, your price and your DPP guidance come from a national member organisation. They do not come from Brussels.

For a company choosing a DPP supplier, the practical consequence is that two suppliers can both be correct when they describe GS1 support differently, because they are describing different member organisations. And a buyer asking "is this GS1 compliant?" is asking a question that has more than one answer depending on where the identifiers were issued.

What the register does about it

GS1 stays as one row, typed as a standards body. Standards bodies are never put through our ten capability checks - those checks ask what a product does, and a standard is not a product. The same applies to Catena-X and to ECLASS.

The register's headquarters field will keep saying Brussels, because that is where the Global Office is and because inventing a better answer would be worse than an honest simplification. This page is what the field cannot say.

If we have something wrong here, the fix is the same as everywhere else in this register: publish the evidence and we will record it.

Sources

Every claim above was read on the page it is attributed to, on 30 July 2026.