Chapter 28. Global Trade Item Number

The Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) actually refers to a family of barcodes on retail packaging. For North American companies, the UPC is the most common member of the GTIN. Attempts at machine-readable package codes started in the grocery business. This is quite logical; a grocery store has a low profit margin and a fast inventory turnover. Anything that saves manual labor shows up on the bottom line immediately.

Modern barcode technology began with a graduate student research project in 1948 at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But it did not catch on for years. The National Association of Food Chains (NAFC) put out a call for technology to speed the checkout process. In 1967 RCA installed one of the first scanning systems at a Kroger store in Cincinnati. But the real problem was that without an open industry standard encoding scheme, each retailer would be stuck with one proprietary system and labels would have to be affixed by hand.