What are UPC bar codes?
UPC stands for Universal Product Code. These bar codes can be found on just about any product in your kitchen cabinets. They are used to for many things but mainly to help merchants keep track of and identify the products they sell. A manufacturer first applys to the UCC (Uniform Code Council) for a six-digit manufacturer identification number. An annual fee is paid for the membership in the UCC who not only issues the manufacturer ID numbers, but provides guidelines on how to use it. You can see the there are two main parts to a UPC symbol. There is the numbers which are human readable and the barcode which is machine readable. The barcode simply lets the machine know what the numbers are. It is much easier for a machine to read the lines and decode them than it would be to teach the machine to read the text numbers. The numbers are the real UPC code. The digits are divided into 4 parts as follows… • The first digit is the Number System Character. This digit tells us what type of UP
