DPP & ESPR, explained
What the EU Digital Product Passport and ESPR are, and how PIE builds compliant, resolvable passports.
The Digital Product Passport (DPP) is an EU initiative under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR): products carry a structured, machine-readable record of their sustainability, provenance, and compliance data, resolvable by anyone with the product's identifier. This page explains the concept; the DPP guide covers publishing one.
What a passport is
A passport is a standardized data record — materials, origin, compliance attributes, and more — bound to a product's GS1 identifier and resolvable from a GS1 Digital Link (often encoded in a QR code on the packaging). Scanning it takes a consumer, regulator, or trading partner to the passport's public page.
How PIE builds one
PIE builds passports from data you already maintain. A passport projects an allowlisted subset of a published product's attributes and linked entities into the ESPR data model — nothing private is exposed, and the passport is snapshotted at publish so its public page is stable and reflects exactly what you published.
The public page is served through a dedicated read-only database role that can see only published passports, and resolved through a Digital Link resolver. This is the same public-surface discipline PIE applies to brand portals and catalogs — see Multi-tenancy & grants.
Registry integration
Passports can be registered with an EU DPP registry. PIE stores each organisation's registry credentials encrypted at rest and resolves them in a background worker when registering, recording whether each passport was registered, skipped, or which credential source was used — so registration is auditable.
Food-specific requirements
A food passport requires the mandatory material/origin entity types to be present. Link those reference entities before publishing a food passport. See the Products guide on reference entities.