Recently, our customers have a lot of questions about the barcodes of products that are manufactured in the United States. Every customer, thanksto the Internet, remembers by heart that products manufactured in the United States and Canada must be marked with a code starting with the digits 00-09. According to the majority, this is what indicates that the product is actually manufactured in the United States. These buyers are in 90% of cases, buying goods from the US, but not finding it of barcode 00-09 want to return or exchange for a similar product, which would contain "cherished" numbers with 0.
The most common two types of codes are UPC or Universal Product Code and EAN or European Article Number.
UPC was developed in 1973 in the United States and contains 12 digits, currently the format is used mainly in the United States. EAN was developed somewhat later and is an improved version of the UPC code. The EAN code uses 13 digits for encoding. The UPC code is converted to the EAN code by adding a zero before twelve digits of the UPC code. Look at the picture above, it clearly illustrates the difference between the 12-digit UPC code and the 13-digit EAN. in fact, there is only one difference, namely, the presence of an additional 0 at the beginning of the barcode. For this reason, the codes of products manufactured in the United States or Canada in the European EAN encoding start from zero.
UPC barcodes are traditionally used in the US, while EAN barcodes are used throughout the rest of the world.
Therefore, if you buy a product from the United States and want to check the barcode, first count the number of digits. If you count 12 digits, it means that this is the UPC format and you need to add 0 at the very beginning. If you count 13 digits, it means that this is the EAN format and you don't need to add anything.
Now look at the photo of a can of BSN's no-Xplode Supplement made in the USA:
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