Kewpie is a food company in Japan that makes mayonnaise and baby food as well as other stuff like Tarako Spaghetti sauce, made famous by the Tarako kewpie. The regular kewpie is their mascot. I happened to stumble upon the factory one evening while walking around Sakurajosui station, which is on the Keio Line, and took this photo with my cell phone. The factory is not as big as I imagined but you can take a tour of the place and get some nice giveaways too. In a press release today, Kewpie announced they were putting QR Codes (barcodes) on all their baby foods so you can use your keitai and call up a webpage with information about the ingredients of the food in case your baby might be allergic to something in it. This seems to have a more practical purpose compared to those QR Codes they have on McDonald’s food packages for you to look up how many empty calories you’re ingesting. When QR Codes first came out here (at least more than 5 years ago) I didn’t find them useful. Most of the barcode readers had poor response and it took several tries before you could capture the text. But now the application responses are super fast and there are tons of uses for QR Codes. Perhaps the most useful are the QR Codes you can find on almost all bus stops. You just read the barcode to capture the bus schedule for that particular stop. Then bookmark it so whenever you want to check when the bus will arrive you can call up the schedule from the internet. Fantastic! I’d like to see Apple iPhone do that!