In 1949, N.J. Woodward filed a patent for a series of circular symbols. These symbols were to be placed on every item in a retail supermarket for the purpose of improving productivity and automating the checkout process. But, it was not until more than two decades later (1973) that the grocery industry gathered to settle on some standard form of product identification. The end result was the U . P.C. (Universal Product Code), a 12-digit number unique to each product. From that initial meeting, an organization was created to standardize and implement the new concept.

The organization later became the UCC (Uniform Code Council) and now oversees the labeling standards for more than 200,000 member companies. Four years after the implementation of the U.P.C., the EAN (European Article Numbering) system was created on an international scale. Derived from the U.P.C., the EAN-13 is one digit longer to accommodate country codes.

In 1968, Identicon Corporation created the 2 of 5 bar code symbology for warehouse inventory and cargo handling. The name comes from the five bars per character, two of which are wide. Due to its low density, 2 of 5 caused problems for manufacturers of bar code printers. In 1972, an interleaved variation created by Interface Mechanisms (Intermec), resolved this issue by combining two values into the same five bars, using the four spaces in between. This interleaving technique meant that a bar code could double the amount of information in the same space.

By 1981, Interleaved 2 of 5 became the accepted symbology for U.P.C. retail multipack containers. The UCC developed the SCC-14 standard with which the supplier uses the same data from its U.P.C. product labels and simply adds a packaging indicator to designate cartons.