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Show HN: Barcode Scanner to check if a product is European

by mnewme on 3/17/25, 5:41 PM with 4 comments

• by tills13 on 3/17/25, 7:12 PM

  (Canadian citizen) I have been looking for something like this but essentially checking if a product is _not_ American. The existing apps / tools seem to be mostly garbage using AI which tends to hallucinate -- the more obscure the product, the worse it is -- or filled with ads.

  Personally, I'd love to see a little more regulation wrt where & how a product must show a Made in / Product of label. It should be front-and-center. I shouldn't have to scan through the mess of ingredients, nutritional facts, etc on the back to try to spot something that isn't even always there.

• by evolve2k on 3/17/25, 7:46 PM

  Ha this took me down a rabbit hole. I once did food packaging design and we had to sort out correct labelling including the barcode so I had vague memories of the barcode system.

  If I’m not mistaken, food packaging is generally labelled worldwide with the same primary bar code type, which specifically is the GS1 standard. Maybe in your head “a normal product barcode”.

  More here:

  https://www.gs1.org

  Seems the country of origin, is encoded into the barcode spec using a 3 digit ISO country code format.

  I’ve not yet worked out which digits..

  But practically once worked out it should be easily determined with a knowing read of the code in numbers (look for the number X which is Y digits in) sort of thing.

  Or equally fairly trivial to make a scanner app that reports the country of origin or visually responds to certain counties of origin.

  Deeper spec here:

  https://ref.gs1.org/standards/genspecs/

  I found country of origin stuff on page 178, but doing this on my phone haven’t yet worked out .. how many digits across the county of origin code is stored.

  Section titled “3.7.1.5 Country of Origin of a Trade Item”.