What you may claim in the bid.

31 July 2026 · the launch journal

Bids are lost at technical evaluation, not at award — and conformance language is where they go to die. An evaluator with the GS1 documents open does not grade adjectives; they grade checkability. So here is the discipline this whole surface is built to support: a sentence goes in the bid only if a command proves it. The permitted sentences, each with its artifact. Then the forbidden ones, each with exactly why it fails.

The permitted sentences, with their proof commands

That last row deserves its transcript, because the suite's first line of output is the honesty policy stated by the tool itself, on every run:

advisory  ADVISORY — this run was produced locally and is unsigned. It carries no
          attestation weight and can never back a ConformanceAttestation.
...
state     passed  passed=18  failed=0  total=18

Eighteen checks, all green, and a banner that refuses to let anyone — including us — inflate what green means. Put both lines in the bid appendix. Evaluators trust tools that state their own limits.

The forbidden sentences, and why each fails checking

• "We are certified EPCIS 2.0 conformant." There is no certificate. No conformance attestation has ever been issued — not to us, not to anyone in this ecosystem — and our own suite prints, on every run, that it can never back one. An evaluator who asks to see the certificate ends the bid right there. Write "demonstrable against the pinned official schema; here is the command" instead — it is both true and stronger.
• *"Deployed at n sites" / any named customer.* We claim no customers and no adoption counts, and your bid may not borrow any from us. Claim your own deployments under your own name only.
• "Certified integration with [network vendor]." Attestations and endorsements that do not exist may not be implied by adjacency. The record here is designed to be verifiable without joining anyone's network — that is the actual differentiator, and it is checkable.
• "Fully implements the EPCIS 2.0 standard." "Fully" is an unbounded claim no artifact can back. The suite enumerates its checks; the ledger at /what-ships-today/ enumerates what is open. Bounded claims survive; total claims are a cross-examination invitation.
• Any sentence with "guaranteed compliance." Conformance is a property of records and interfaces you can test; compliance is a legal judgment about your client's process. A bid that confuses them tells the evaluator you do too.

Handling "are you certified?" in the room

The question will come, and the honest answer is the strong one: "No such certification exists — for anyone. What we give you instead is better: every conformance property in this proposal is a command your own team can run, against pinned artifacts you can re-hash against GS1's published originals." Then run one, live: npx epcis.dev pins, five lines, five digests. The integrator who says "run it" against a field of vendors saying "trust us" is playing a different game — and the evaluator knows which game their auditor will eventually play.

Where to point the evaluator

Everything above is public surface: the conformance page for the pins and the RFC 7807 refusal contract, Run it yourself for the five-minute transcript, the ISV pillar for the embed argument if your bid includes product work, and the tarball's AGENTS.md for the machine-readable contract your client's engineers will actually diff. The field-day pipeline those bid sentences describe is Commission the site before lunch.

Write the bid so that every conformance sentence ends, implicitly, with a command. You will lose nothing you could have honestly won, and you will stop losing the evaluations you were winning on paper.