From substandard shoes and garment imitations to heavily-leaded toys, now comes the melamine milk scare. The whole world seems becoming paranoid of China-made goods.
Since, Chinese businessmen know that consumers do not prefer products "Made in China" nowadays, they are now forced not to show on their product labels from which country these products are made.
But there is a remedy for that. You may refer to the product barcode. By looking at the first three digits of the barcode, you can now determine from which country the product is made.
The numbers 690, 691, 692, 693, 694 or 695 indicate that the product is "Made in China", while the numbers 958 and 471 indicate that the product comes from Macau and Taiwan, respectively.
For your information, listed below are the three flag barcode characters per issuing countries which you may use as a general reference.
However, these flag barcode characters are only applicable to linear or one dimensional barcodes or symbologies as shown in the figure above. Barcodes can also come in patterns of squares, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns, which may be in the form of two dimensional matrix codes or symbologies.
Posts
2 comments:
I really wish people would research this more before it got around the internet. This only refers to EAN numbers and not North American UPC numbers. EAN numbers are European Article Numbers(European Barcodes)
Some companies in the US products UPC/barcode could start with a 690, 691, 692, 693, 694 or 695 but that doesn't mean the product is from China.
Thanks for your comment.
Post a Comment