GS1 starts celebrating its 40th Anniversary today. On April 3rd 1973, leaders of the American grocery industry selected a single standard for product identification that the world now knows as the GS1 Bar Code. The decision created a global language of business that until today allows visibility in the entire supply chain in multiple sectors.

Just one year later (on June 26, 1974, at 8:01 a.m.), the first GS1 bar code was scanned for the very first time in Troy, Ohio. How could we even imagine that, forty years later, over 5 billion products would be scanned every day, all over the world? Product identification stands for more than marking goods and scanning them: it made a global market possible.

With this 40th Anniversary in mind, GS1 wants to look ahead to the next 40 years and build a world where things and related information move efficiently and securely for the benefit of businesses and improvement of people’s lives, every day, everywhere.

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