Lets relook at the relevance of barcodes on today’s retail food and grocery packaging. The original newsletter was accidently broadcast prior to the correct referencing and fact checking. I have updated the article as per below, and the importance message of reading labels remains the same.

To begin with there is a lot of misinformation regarding the nature of the encoded information in barcodes and what this information means.

By educating we can dispel many of the myths and explain in simple terms what barcodes are used for and what information they contain. To start with, there is very little consumer level information that is of any benefit or even interest to a consumer as the main purpose of a barcode is at a business to business level to allow for easy pricing, replenishment and sales tracking of these items. This is why reading and understanding labels is the best approach. (see below)

Let’s have a look at a standard 13 digit barcode found on most retail items the EAN 13 or now known as the GS1-13 and how to decode the information it contains. The first three digits relate to the country code, this is the country of origin of the barcode but not necessarily the country of origin of the food products or the company that has registered the barcode. For a complete list of the GS1 country prefixes please see http://www.gs1.org/company-prefix.

Any company with an Australian Company Number (ACN) or Australian Business Number (ABN) can apply for a GS1 Australia barcode Company prefix and Code, under certain circumstances International companies can also be granted these numbers as well. Whilst looking for the company prefix in a barcode may provide you with some information about where the barcode was generated it may not tell you too much about the source of the products or if the company is registered in that country. For instance an Australian registered country can have products produced in China and have the manufacturer apply their Australian generated barcode to the product packaging, this is perfectly legal and legitimate.

“So although 93 does relate to Australia, the original product could come from another county and it’s been re-barcoded in Australia. This could easily be confusing but there are no conspiracies”. Bradley Wardrop-Brown MAIP, MFTAA B App Sc (Food Science), Assc. Deg App Sc (Food Processing), Dip App Sc (Food Technology) Principal Food Scientist

Source- GS1 Australia

Looking at the barcode above you can see the first three digits 931 are an Australian prefix, the following six digits are the unique company identifier, a company can have one or many prefixes/identifiers as each company identifier only gives you 1000 products ( second group of numbers 000-999) and the last is a very clever little number which works from a complex mathematical formula that helps the barcode scanning equipment to ensure it read the barcode correctly…it’s called the check digit because this is the final check of the validity of the number read from the bars by the laser scanner. For those interested see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_digit

There are many other forms of barcodes such as the EAN/GS1 8 which as the name implies only has 8 digits and is used on very small items such as chewing gum and lifesaver packets as the format is smaller but the format remains basically identical.

Bar codes are also found on the shipping carton multiples of the retail items and is generally associated with the retail item by using the same “product number” but generating a ITF/GS1 14 barcode which is 14 digits long.

What is important is not to confuse barcodes with PLU (price look up) codes used in the US, there are generally set in categories and used to identify individual products, conventional and organic produce etc and are common across the entire grocery market. Barcode number by contrast have their item numbers generally provided one after the other so a large food producer may have their first pasta sauce with the number 000 and their pasta 001 and so on, there is no “category” reference to be found in the three digits used.

I hope this provided at least a little clarification regarding the use and generation of barcodes and the information they contain. For further information please see http://www.gs1au.org/

PLU codes in Australia are as follows:

https://www.gs1au.org/assets/documents/industry/fresh_produce/mis_fprod_plu_pres.pdf

PLU codes in the US are as follows:

Conventionally Grown Fruit: These four-digit numbers run through all the fruits. For example, guava is 4299 and a banana is 4011. You can also search PLU codes online.

Organically Grown Fruit: This produce has five digit labels that start with the number 9. An organically-grown banana would be 94011.

Genetically Modified Food: These five digit labels start with an 8, so for example, a genetically engineered vine ripe tomato would be 84805.