If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

On China products bar code — I got a forwarded email today tipping that since the advent of Melamine chemical that is seemingly plaguing China products especially dairy/milk, some China companies opted not to write on where their products came from or where they were produced. In the email, it is said that you can identify if a product came from China or not by referring to barcode number 690-692. This number is actually taken from the 13-digit European Article Number (EAN) found on packaging.

The EAN 13-digits bar code is defined by the Global Standards Organization also known as GS1. Established in 1973, the organization is administering barcodes for retail products in about 140 member countries. Whereby, China got its assigned GS1 prefixes as 690, 691 and 692.

While too good to be a complete relief, there is a case brought by a 54 year old senior technician  Chan Chee Kong, finding his Chinese cooking wines, labelled as a product of China with the Singapore code prefix 888.

In other words, products may bear a country’s unique product code where it may have been repacked and not where it was actually manufactured. Simply put that in the absence of the written declaration where the product came from, you can’t just rely on the barcode option.