It was April 3, 1973 when, in the United States, the main companies in the consumer goods sector decided to introduce a single standard for product identification: a year later, the first product with the “Gs1 barcode” was scanned at a Marsh supermarket checkout in the city of Troy, Ohio: a package of Wrigley’s chewing gum costing 61 cents on the dollar
To reconstruct the history of the bar code (whose first conception is even earlier and dates back to the first post-war period) is Gs1“the non-profit organization that develops the world‘s most widely used standards for business communication”.
Today GS1 barcodes are found on over a billion products: in Italy alone, in supermarkets, hypermarkets and self-service outlets, approximately 350,000 consumer products packaged with a GS1 barcode (not counting variable weight products and non-food) which they pass through the till 30.2 billion times, generating 2.7 billion receipts.
«The arrival of the barcode – they tell Gs1 – was so revolutionary that the BBC included it among the “50 things that made the economy global”: has forever changed the way we shop, continues to do so today, by linking a physical product to digital information that travels unhindered throughout the supply chain».
And in all likelihood it will continue to do so in the future, riding the digital revolution we are going through. Next generation codes (such as i two-dimensional QR codes) can contain “unprecedented amounts of reliable data for companies, regulators, consumers and patients, offering much more than just links to web pages”. They can tell the “story” of a product, its origin, the presence of allergens, organic certification, recycling methods and its environmental footprint, reaching a new level of transparency that will help people make more informed decisions about what they buy and use.