Half a century ago an invention was created that revolutionized the trading industry. About fifteen representatives of the sector met in New York to decide on the design of the system that would allow products to be identified. This is how the now well-known barcode was born, which is read 6,000 million times a day and which we can find everywhere. And it is that nobody could imagine a world in which this code was not scanned at supermarket checkouts.
It was in 1973 when the proposal to create a system, inspired by Morse code, was devised that would allow products to be easily identified. It was a kind of ID for items that quickly spread throughout the planet to become one of the inventions that have most transformed the modern economy.
However, it took a year to have the first practical application of the barcode. A clerk in a supermarket in Ohio (United States) was the first person to pass this invention through the reader, scanning a pack of chewing gum that cost 67 cents.
In Spain we had to wait a little longer, although the proposal crossed the Atlantic very quickly and, just three years later, the European Article Numbering Association (EAN) was founded in Brussels. This non-profit organization was dedicated to the management of commercial standards. That same year, the Association of Manufacturers and Distributors (Aecoc) was created in Spanish territory, still one of the largest business associations in the country.
The first barcode to be scanned in Spain was a scourer, purchased in 1981 at a 3M company store. And, now, it is impossible to imagine any product that does not have this symbol stamped on the back. Undoubtedly, an invention that is seen daily and is not always aware that its use is quite recent.
Barcodes, there are several types, are used to identify, capture and share information about products, locations, companies and all kinds of data. Its reading has become a daily act that is repeated 6,000 million times a day, since it can be found in 1,000 million products around the world and is used by two million companies, according to EFE.
According to Aecoc data, it reduces the resources allocated to the exchange of information between agents in the food chain by 60% and is also key to one of the most pursued and shared challenges: it reduces food waste by up to 40%.
For a consumer, it can be somewhat complex to interpret the numbers and lines of different sizes that make up a code and that convey a large amount of information when read with a laser. The numbers, at first glance, do not provide information and have no meaning, they explain from the Aecoc. It is equivalent to a person's ID and the true value of this identification lies in the information it contains in its database.
In the usual 13-digit code, its reading can be divided into three sections. The first numbers serve to identify the GS1 organization that assigns the code and the company that has requested it to code its products. The following digits serve as a counter for the references registered by the companies and, finally, the control digit is the result of a calculation that allows the products to be uniquely identified. The bars simply contain the numerical information as symbols to allow it to be read by scanners.
