35 years of barcodes

The 35^th anniversary of the Universal Product Code (U.P.C.) bar code will be celebrated on June 3, 2009 by GS1 US, the developer and administrator of the U.P.C. for more than 200,000 businesses in the United States. The organization will mark the event with a giant U.P.C.-adorned birthday cake for more than 800 attendees at its annual U Connect Conference in Orlando.

One of the world’s best-known symbols, the U.P.C. comprises a row of 59 machine-readable black and white bars and 12 human-readable digits. Both the bars and the digits convey the same information: the identity of a specific product and its manufacturer. Originally developed to help supermarkets speed up the checkout process, the first live use of a U.P.C. took place in a Marsh Supermarkets store in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974, when a cashier scanned a package of Wrigley’s gum. It ushered in extraordinary economic and productivity gains for shoppers, retailers and manufacturers alike, with estimated annual cost savings of $17 billion in the grocery sector alone, according to one study. The U.P.C. was quickly adopted by other industries, which sought to capture the benefits it had delivered to the grocery industry. Today U.P.C.s are scanned more than 10 billion times a day in applications spanning more than 25 industries, including consumer packaged goods, apparel, hardware, food services, healthcare, logistics, government, and high-tech. Contrary to one popular myth, the U.P.C. does not contain a product’s country of origin. But the U.P.C. is one manifestation of the Global Trade Item Number, a foundational aspect of the GS1 System that enables consistent, standard identification of products and other items in the supply chain globally.