Product Data for Dry Goods: Mandatory Fields Clean, Content Strong

A bag of pasta looks like the simplest product in the world. Then you try to list it online correctly. Suddenly you need the exact ingredient list with allergens emphasised, the full nutrition table per 100 grams, the net quantity, the origin, the business operator — every field legally mandatory, every field checked. And once all of that is in place, you still haven't written a single word that makes anyone want to buy it.

Product data for dry goods splits into two layers: the legally mandatory compliance fields and the selling content that sits on top. The mandatory layer is non-negotiable and heavily regulated; the content layer is where the sale actually happens. Most systems get you one or the other. This is a sub-branch of the broader food & beverage data challenge, and it's where the tension between legal duty and marketing is sharpest.

Which fields are mandatory — and why is dry goods so data-heavy?

Packaged dry groceries fall squarely under the EU Food Information to Consumers Regulation (FIC / LMIV 1169/2011). That regulation dictates a long list of fields that must be present, correct and consistent on every prepacked article:

• Legal product name and the full ingredient list, with the 14 major allergens emphasised.
• The mandatory nutrition declaration — energy plus fat, saturates, carbohydrate, sugars, protein and salt, per 100 g/ml.
• Net quantity, best-before or use-by date, storage conditions and the food business operator's details.
• For many categories: origin, nutrition or health claims, and category-specific declarations.

Now multiply that by hundreds of SKUs from dozens of suppliers, each delivering the data in a different shape. Getting every mandatory field complete and correct is a genuine compliance risk done by hand — one missing allergen flag is not a cosmetic error. This is exactly the manual burden a structured consolidate-and-normalize process is built to remove.

Does GDSN deliver the mandatory data — and where does it stop?

Food retail does have a strong standard for exactly this: GDSN, the Global Data Synchronisation Network, accessed in the DACH region through GS1 data pools such as 1WorldSync. For the branded FMCG core, GDSN is genuinely valuable — it delivers clean, standardised master data including the FIC-relevant fields. But it's worth being honest about what it does and doesn't cover:

In short: GDSN covers the mandatory fields of the branded core well and gives you a clean compliance skeleton. What it doesn't give you is coverage of every regional and own-brand supplier — and it gives you no selling content at all. That second gap is the one nobody talks about.

Why isn't clean compliance data enough — and how does Productbay close the content gap?

Even with every FIC field perfectly filled, a product page built on GDSN alone is a legal document, not a sales pitch. A shopper deciding between two brands of oats is convinced by a benefit-led description, usage and recipe ideas, a strong title and clean images — none of which live in the compliance layer. Writing that content by hand across a full dry-goods range simply doesn't scale.

Productbay solves both halves by keeping them separate but in one record:

• Consolidate: import every source once — GDSN/pool export, supplier CSV, Excel, feed URL, PDF datasheet — and match by GTIN/EAN so mandatory fields land validated and locked in a single catalog.
• Enrich: AI generates only the free content around the compliance data — titles, descriptions, category assignments, usage ideas, translations via DeepL — while the FIC fields stay untouched. Everything passes a review queue before it goes live.
• Publish: two-way sync to Shopify and Shopware, ERP connections (Xentral, weclapp), and feed exports for Amazon, OTTO and Kaufland — each with per-channel transformations.

Productbay starts where GDSN ends: it takes over the suppliers outside the pool, fills the mandatory fields the standard never carried for them, and writes the selling content no data pool provides. For the full picture across the sector, see the food & beverage overview. Productbay is built for specialist retailers running multi-supplier, multi-channel catalogs — from mid-sized shops to large chains. To understand how the underlying standards fit together, see GDSN, ETIM & eCl@ss explained.

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