There are more than a billion products in the world recognizable thanks to that row of black lines and numbers that is the barcode that celebrates its 50th birthday today.
It was created on April 3, 1973 in the USA when, in the United States, the main large-scale consumer companies decided to introduce a single standard for the identification of products.
It was invented by two engineering students from Drexel University who were asked by the manager of a supermarket to work on the idea of a code for marking products that would allow automatic recognition at checkouts and speed up queues and payments.
First product to be scanned, a year later, a 61 cent pack of chewing gum.
An invention that has revolutionized by globalizing the identification of content, companies and origin and now many other indications and data.
In Italy, every year 350,000 consumer products packaged with the GS1 barcode pass through the checkouts of supermarkets, hypermarkets and self-service points of sale 30.2 billion times, generating 2.7 billion receipts.
GS1 barcodes (the most common) are made up of 13 digits, i.e. the company prefix that identifies the company internationally;
the product code;
a check digit, calculated on the basis of the others present in the code through an algorithm.
