A Facebook post with more than 38,000 shares claims Israel has “changed its barcode from 729 to 841 and now to 871 in order to avoid boycott of its products”.
This claim, which we’ve also seen made by a number of other Facebook posts, is misleading, for two reasons.
Firstly, the Israeli member organisation of GS1, the nonprofit that issues company prefixes for barcodes globally, continues to use the prefix ‘729’ and has not started using a different prefix. Barcodes starting ‘841’ and ‘871’ are assigned by the organisations in Spain and the Netherlands respectively.
Secondly, barcode prefixes don’t necessarily indicate where a product was made or where the company which made it is based anyway.
We’ve written about this claim before and have seen versions of it circulating since at least 2021.
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What can the prefix of a barcode tell you?
A spokesperson for GS1, the non-profit organisation which assigns barcodes worldwide, told Full Fact that “barcode numbers do not identify a product’s country of origin. The prefix of a GS1 barcode number (its 3 first digits) only indicates the GS1 Member Organisation that has licenced the number to a manufacturer”.
They added: “Companies around the world can choose any of the 116 GS1 Member Organisations they want to work with, regardless of where they are based or where they produce their products. No matter where a barcode number is allocated, it can be used globally for trading.”
According to the GS1 website, the number 729 at the start of a barcode indicates that the barcode was allocated by the Israeli branch of GS1. But as GS1 says, that doesn’t mean the product was made or manufactured in Israel, or that the company which made it is based there.
For example, Full Fact found one example of a company in Israel which sells barcodes for products whose barcodes started with 07. The company says on its website (translated from Hebrew by Google): “Barcode numbers do not say anything about the country of origin of the product or the company. The first digits of a barcode number only show the country of origin of the barcode number. Our numbers start with 07, which shows that the number comes from the USA.”
Another company selling barcodes in the UK, Get A Barcode Limited, says its codes were “originally issued to a US company”.
Israeli-allocated barcodes have not changed their prefix
There is no evidence to suggest barcodes starting ‘841’ or ‘871’ are associated with Israel.
According to GS1’s website, the barcode number prefixes between 870 and 879 have been allocated by GS1 in the Netherlands, not Israel. Barcode number prefixes between 840 and 849 indicate the number was registered in Spain. GS1 told us that occasionally member organisations could be allocated an additional prefix for “justified capacity needs”, but added: “GS1 prefixes have never changed.”
Of course, as outlined above, that doesn’t mean that individual Israeli companies might not choose to begin using different barcodes, but we’ve seen no specific evidence of this happening.
When we asked GS1 if it was aware of any such trend, it told us “we are not aware of any of those practices”, but added that it was not in a position to comment on the business practices of more than two million member companies.