Jan Somers started his career as Director of the VP in the Brussels Parliament, became advisor to Minister W. Demeester in the Flemish Government and became later on active in the European Footwear Industry Confederation, in BABM (Belgian Association for Brand Manufacturers) and ECR Belgium as lobbyist (negotiating trade agreements) and project manager R&D.  The merge of GS1 Belgium & Luxembourg and ECR Belgium in July 2007 brought Jan SOMERS to GS1 Belgilux as Deputy CEO and ECR Manager.

Jan Somers is CEO of GS1 Belgium & Luxembourg since January 2010, member of the GS1 GO Advisory Council, the GDSN Board of GS1 GO and the REC of GS1 in Europe as Vice-Chair.

He has a license in Political and Social sciences (KU Leuven Belgium) and a master in European Politics (University Robert Schuman Strasbourg France).

In 2010 he launched GDSN in Belgium. Today, more than 2000 companies deliver data via the data pool to retailers in FMCG and Foodservice, in the Benelux and worldwide. In 2014 he launched trustbox, a platform for B2C food data with now 2200 companies sharing food data with the market, and since 2018, a Benelux project was started on GDSN for the DIY -garden-pet sector. The market leaders in DIY (Belgium and the Netherlands) are all live now with GDSN. In 2016 he realized the implementation of GS1 standards in the Healthcare sector with the introduction of the GS1 DataMatrix.