The barcode prefix does not tell you where a product was made
There is a claim about barcodes that circulates every few years, usually attached to a call to boycott something: the first digits tell you which country a product was made in. Scan a jar, read the prefix, learn the origin. It is wrong, and the organisation that issues the numbers says so directly: Since GS1 user companies can manufacture products anywhere in the world, GS1 Prefixes do not…
The popular belief that barcodes reveal a product's country of manufacture is incorrect. Barcodes consist of a prefix that identifies the GS1 member organisation that allocated the number to the brand owner, not the country where the product was made. GS1 Prefixes are not country-specific and can be manufactured anywhere in the world.
The GS1 organisation that issues the numbers explains that prefixes do not identify the country of origin for a given product. The organisation that allocated the number to the brand owner keeps those number ranges wherever it later manufactures. The Swedish example of a 73x prefix illustrates how a company can have units made in Vietnam, and the barcode remains unchanged.
The author built a dataset to correct this misunderstanding, available through a Swedish-language lookup tool. The dataset reconciles GS1's prefix list with the English Wikipedia article List of GS1 country codes, flagging disagreements between the two sources. The author notes that two specific prefixes, 612 and 894, have conflicting designations between GS1 and Wikipedia, and includes them in the dataset as booleans for transparency.
The author emphasizes the importance of understanding that ranges not classified as countries, such as 020 - 029, 200 - 299, and others, have specific purposes unrelated to country of origin.
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