A traceability pilot from e.centre, an electronic commerce organisation, is due to come to fruition in December.

The EN128 pilot will be a barcode that encodes traceability information including the batch number of the produce, date of production and supplier details.

Alice Mukaru, from e.centre's consulting services department, was at the company's post-AGM cocktail party in London on Wednesday evening and told freshinfo: 'There will be a new food law in 2005 which will include traceability, and this will start people thinking about what traceability will mean. Bearing in mind that people may already be using the EN128 product for identification purposes, our pilot will already be familiar to them.' Another barcode innovation in the pipeline from e.centre is reduced space symbology (RSS), which Mukaru explained: 'A normal barcode is usually too big to go on individual pieces of fruit, so this is small enough to identify pieces individually but contains the same information as a normal barcode.

'The demand for this comes from the difficulty in identifying individual fruit because at the end of the day fruit comes from so many areas that fresh produces loses a lot of the benefits of automatic identification.' While RSS is still under development at the moment, e.centre has the specifications for the model and is working on the plans at the moment. Although Mukaru admitted there was a 'rough timetable' of when the smaller barcode was expected to appear, she was reluctant to commit herself to when this might be.

Also at the party was Paul Nutter, Tesco's head of labelling law and barcoding. Tesco is one of the companies interested in e.centre's EN128 pilot, and Nutter revealed the retailer is also working closely with the development of the Produce Electronic Identification Board (PEIB).

Having been set up in the US and now become a global standard, PEIB refers to the tiny number printed on the stickers on individual pieces of fruit, such as apples and oranges.

These numbers identify where the fruit came from and is also a way for checkout staff to be sure of the variety and price of the fruit when customers bring it to the till.

Nutter explained to freshinfo that Tesco has introduced the PEIB system into a number of its stores, and as it has been so successful will be bringing it across the board in a matter of time.

He said: 'We want to encourage all suppliers of produce to put these numbers on their fruit. Apples and oranges already have the numbers, but on all fruit. The more suppliers that do this, the better information we can get at the checkout.

'At the moment we would only sell one variety of produce loose, because at the checkout staff can't identify the different varieties. With the numbers we can identify them and therefore offer more choice to the customer and more marketing opportunities to the supplier.'