History
A 30th celebration
In 2009 we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the first move to introduce GS1 standards into New Zealand. The New Zealand Product Numbering Council was formed in 1979 and in the years that followed, this country became one of the fastest to embrace globally-standard identification and bar coding.
Bar code beginnings
The first bar code patent was established in the United States in 1949, but it wasn’t until 1974 that the first product was sold using a scanner. The product - a packet of chewing gum – is now housed in a Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. It took a few years for the technology to reach mass adoption across the world. Today over two million companies apply GS1 identifiers and bar codes under the GS1 System.
