Identifying Products from China
October 9th, 2008Due to melamine scare that made people world wide prefer not to buy Chinese-made products, an e-mail informing consumers how to identify products from China by their barcodes are being forwarded recently.
In this e-mail, it informs readers to differentiate each country’s products by the first 3 digits of the bar code. It states: products made in China starts with barcode: 690/691/692.
However, Chan Chee Kong, a senior technician says it is not true. He cited an example: his Chinese cooking wines bore the Singapore-assigned prefix 888, despite being labeled as a product of China.
Furthermore, the 13-digit EAN (European Article Number) barcode is defined by global standards organization GS1, which is responsible for administering barcodes in about 140 member countries. According to its website, GS1 prefixes do not provide identification of country of origin for a given product.
Each country indeed has a unique three-digit prefix, but the question is, how do we know if the ingredients or contents of a product is from that country too? So, we cannot solely rely on the first 3-digit of the product’s barcode to identify if is made in China.
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