the QR code should gradually replace the barcode

It triggers more than ten billion “beeps” a day worldwide at store checkouts. More than a billion product references carry one. A symbol of the development of mass consumption, the barcode – first scanned at the checkout in June 1974 with a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum – is now being pushed out by changing consumption patterns.

His replacement warming up on the bench? The QR code or Quick Response Code, this square made up of small black and white pictograms, invented by a Japanese engineer in 1994, with which the French became familiar during the crisis linked to Covid-19, which allowed you to display your health pass or access restaurant menus.

To facilitate the circulation of consumer goods, 273 companies (distributors, food manufacturers, etc.) defined, on April 3, 1973, the barcode as a standardized information exchange system, creating, to manage it, a international non-profit organization governed by its users worldwide, GS1. Today, 57,000 companies in France – two million worldwide in twenty-five sectors – belong to this federation, which covers 150 countries. Their objective: to use a common language recognized worldwide on all circuits of international trade.

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Also called the European Article Numbering (EAN) code, the barcode is above all a means of capturing the information contained in the thirteen digits listed below, which constitute the identification number of a product, its identify. The first digits represent the prefix assigned to a company, which itself personalizes the following ones for each product reference. “A unique barcode identifies a given product”summarizes Renaud de Barbuat, president of GS1 World.

Limits

But this nomenclature showed its limits, in France, during the Lactalis affair, in December 2017, where batches of infant milk powder had been contaminated with salmonella, causing the contamination of thirty-eight infants. The recall procedure put in place by the group had been chaotic, some boxes had continued to be sold in stores. Impossible, then, with the barcode to automatically block bad boxes of powdered milk at the checkout, the list of which was growing day by day.

The supermarkets had ended up withdrawing from sale all the products of the brands concerned. A parliamentary commission of inquiry charged with learning the lessons of this affair estimated, six months later, that“there is no satisfactory system, insofar as we only have a thirteen-digit EAN code, which only defines the reference and gives the price”, and “the implementation of a QR code or the lengthening of the barcode beyond thirteen digits would be more effective”.

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