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Tool suggestion: Barcodepedia (barcode to brand owner, licensee and GS1 registrant)

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
65/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Domain
content, documentation

Research direction

No file, test, or entry point is named. Start by locating the repository's existing tool listings and the Companies and Finance category, then compare their format with the Barcodepedia details in this issue. Done when the suggestion is added consistently with the existing listing structure and its related-party disclosure is retained.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Suggested category: Companies and Finance

Disclosure: related-party suggestion. I run Barcodepedia. This is a suggestion, and no is a fine answer.

URL: https://barcodepedia.com

Description: A free product encyclopedia sorted by barcode (EAN/UPC/GTIN). Enter the barcode from a pack, or a product, brand or company name. The product page names the companies behind it, and the company pages keep apart roles that are often confused: brand owner, licensee or bottler, and the GS1 barcode registrant. Example: in Denmark, Coca-Cola is bottled by Carlsberg under licence, and the barcodes are registered to Carlsberg (https://barcodepedia.com/company/carlsberg-danmark). GS1 prefix pages explain that a prefix names the GS1 office that issued the number, not the country where the product was made (https://barcodepedia.com/gs1/570). Every fact carries a citation to the page it came from. Use case: identifying who is really behind a product in a photo or on a shelf, before going to company registries.

Cost: Free.

Level of difficulty: 1 of 5. Type or paste a barcode number.

Requirements: none. No account, no API key.

Limitations: coverage is about 1,600 products today, mostly food and drink from North America, the Nordics and the EU. It is growing quickly as new products are added from public sources, but many barcodes you try will not have a page yet. There is no public API or bulk download, and the data is not openly licensed. It is a secondary source: the citations point to the primary pages (company registries, brand sites, GS1 records, Open Food Facts, USDA), and those should be checked for anything that matters.

Ethical considerations: the pages hold product and company data, not personal data. Lookups are passive. A lookup for a barcode without a page is counted so I know what to add next.

Similar tools: Open Food Facts is open data with far more food products, but it doesn't model ownership or licensing. Barcode Lookup and UPCitemdb list retail listings and prices without citing sources. GS1's Verified by GS1 is the authority on who registered a barcode, but it says nothing about brand owners or licensees.

Tool provider: Moltke Benjaminsen ApS (Denmark).

Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
669
Forks
116
Avg merge
3h 1m
Merged PRs (30d)
5

Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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