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Mar 31, 2021 at 1:34 PMFifty years ago, on March 31, 1971, leading representatives from the largest companies in the consumer goods industry and trade agreed on a 13-digit number: the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN). This was intended to replace the price tag and to uniquely identify products in the future, in order to provide information about the product. What they did not know at the time was that this number would lay the foundation for the digitization of global trade.
(Cologne) The story of the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) is one of the great, untold success stories of the economy. On March 31, 1971, representatives from the then most significant companies in the food, retail, and consumer goods sectors, including Heinz, General Mills, Kroger, and Bristol Meyer, decided to identify products in the future with a unique number. They believed it was possible that the GTIN could also positively impact the entire supply networks beyond the grocery store by increasing the speed and efficiency of transactions and processes. The GTIN was to be machine-readable via the barcode.
GTIN Scanned for the First Time in a Supermarket in Ohio
In 1974, the first barcode was scanned on a pack of chewing gum in a supermarket in Ohio, thus capturing the GTIN for the first time in a machine-readable format. The associated beep is now indispensable in retail – and today, the number under the barcode is scanned over six billion times a day worldwide. Until 2009, the GTIN was still referred to as EAN (short for European Article Number) in Europe. The global exchange of goods made it necessary to establish a uniform, cross-continental article numbering system. Thus, the GTIN is the successor to the EAN.
In online retail, the GTIN is also playing an increasingly important role. More and more marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Google, and Otto require their sellers to label items with the GTIN. This way, products can be better found by shoppers in search engines and on marketplaces. Whether in brick-and-mortar retail or online: The GTIN uniquely identifies items and does so without overlap worldwide. This means that the master data associated with the GTIN can be precisely assigned to that product – like a kind of fingerprint.
Shoppers Want to Know More About the Products
Shoppers want to know more about the items they purchase, such as allergens and nutritional values, whether it is organic, or what the product’s CO2 footprint is. Many new shopper-centric offerings are only made possible by the GTIN, such as apps that show shoppers where they can find the product they are looking for. The GTIN – a true hidden champion.
The GTIN is one of 24 standards of the globally represented network GS1. In Germany, GS1 Germany, based in Cologne, is the authorized issuing office for the GTIN. Around 80,000 customers use the services of GS1 Germany and develop future-proof solutions with the not-for-profit organization – thus continuing the success story.
Photo: © GS1 Germany
