A GS1 US initiative nicknamed Operation Brilliance gave 30,000 apparel cartons a web address of their own. The eight-week pilot gave Walmart and Hanesbrands (now Gildan) their first true end-to-end view of what actually moves through the supply chain.
Walmart and Hanes conducted a pilot program using RFID tags and 2D barcodes with a new GS1 SSCC++ encoding scheme that allows cartons to transmit their location and contents throughout the supply chain, achieving nearly perfect tracking accuracy and enabling brands to recover millions in claims disputes while improving on-shelf availability.
- The eight-week pilot shipped 30,000 cartons and half a million units with 99.9998% detection rates at distribution centers and 97% detection at retail stores
- GS1's updated RFID Tag Data Standard (TDS 2.3) enables SSCC++ tags to carry web addresses, allowing cartons to automatically report their location to the shipper's database
- The technology works with both RFID chips and 2D barcodes, eliminating the need for expensive hardware upgrades at every checkpoint
- Supply chain visibility at four key nodes—packing, 3PL consolidation, regional distribution, and retail stores—enables verification of expected contents instead of merely discovering what's in a carton
- The approach replaces complex bilateral data-sharing agreements with a standardized GS1 backbone, reducing infrastructure costs and making supply chain data accessible to all partners
For years, the packaged goods that move between a brand owner’s dock and a retailer’s shelf have traveled through what one GS1 US exec calls “a black hole.” A carton is tagged at the factory and scanned at a limited set of downstream read points requiring bi-lateral data sharing arrangements. But in between, it essentially disappears. In spring of 2026, a small group of trading partners set out to prove that the middle of the supply chain no longer has to be dark. The numbers they brought to Las Vegas to present at GS1 Connect suggest they succeeded.
Over eight weeks running from mid-February to mid-April 2026, Hanesbrands (recently acquired by Gildan Activewear) shipped roughly 30,000 cartons, about half a million individual units, to multiple Walmart locations under a pilot that tracked each carton at every point it was handled, from the pick line to the store. Presented across several sessions at GS1 Connect, the results were striking. A packaging-validation audit showed a perfect match to the trade items that were supposed to be in the cartons*, and downstream read points recorded nearly 100% detection (99.9998% DC detection and 97% store detection) of items observed across multiple checkpoints.
“Frankly, I was shocked,” said Jonathan Gregory, senior director of global standards at GS1 US, who led the project. Analyzing the cartons that flowed to two specific Walmart stores, he said, “we missed one tag at one read point out of all the cartons that went to those two stores. And that tag was read at other read points along the pathway.”
A multimillion-dollar blind spot
The pilot was aimed squarely at a problem every retailer and supplier knows all too well: claims compliance. When a brand owner ships a carton [case] and a retailer believes it arrived short, the two sides have historically had little more than competing records to argue over.
Dan Hardy, director of customer operations at Gildan, described his company’s opportunity as a funnel. “At the bottom of the funnel, or the lowest-hanging fruit, is claims compliance,” he said. “I don’t have great visibility to solving for carton shortages when I ship them to … Walmart, or proving to … Walmart that what I say I put into a carton is actually what is there, and being able to have that visibility throughout that total chain to prove that and recoup that money.” His verdict on the scale of the problem? “That’s a multimillion-dollar issue for Hanes.”
Further up Hardy’s funnel sit richer prizes. So-called “on-shelf availability” data across all of Gildan’s major retail accounts, and sharper forecasting and replenishment models once the company can see the nodes between its dock and the store. “What it’s not,” he said of today’s supply chain, “is it’s not transparent and it’s not traceable.”
On the retail side, Randall Anzalone, senior director of inventory visibility and accuracy at Walmart, framed the same gap in the language of his operations teams with a common metric—on time and full.
“Did it come on time, and then did I get everything I was supposed to get?” he asked. “We don’t do a very good job of understanding — from supplier to the 3PL, did that handoff happen? … And then I lose visibility as I go through my entire supply chain.” With import DCs, consolidation DCs, fashion DCs and regional DCs all in the path, he said, “that whole chain, there was a lot of trust that we really had to rely on, because that’s all we had.”
You don’t have to use RFID
For a brand owner weighing packaging investment, one of the pilot’s most important findings is that 2D data capture can be used as well. The logistics data carrier can just as easily be printed as chipped, and serialized content data from carton scan/pack activity could be captured by scanning a serialized 2D barcode. “Yes, we used RFID for that,” Gregory said of the packing validation, “but a 2D barcode that has a GTIN and a serial number could have been image-scanned. So you didn’t need to use an RFID reader to capture serialized carton content data.” Scan-pack an item with an image scanner, he noted, and “you’re getting that robust data that way. There are multiple ways to get to the data in the 2D world.”
That flexibility dovetails with the industry’s march toward Sunrise 2027, GS1’s target date for retailers and brands to be able to process 2D barcodes at point of sale.
“Shout out for Sunrise 2027 and the 2D barcode on the Hanes/Gildan product,” Hardy said. “We’re not fully compliant, but we will be. I think we’ll be there before most of the retailers,” he joked. For packaging teams already re-architecting artwork for the 2D transition, the takeaway is that the same barcode they are adding for the checkout lane can pull double duty as a supply-chain data carrier, potentially without a single RFID inlay.