What was the first product ever scanned with a barcode at a checkout?

Every day, billions of beeps ring out at checkouts around the world. Each one traces back to a single moment in a small Ohio town, when a cashier slid one item over a brand-new scanner and the till rang it up all by itself. The historic item was not a turkey or a tin of soup. It was chewing gum.

The short answer

Shortly after 8am on 26 June 1974, at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, cashier Sharon Buchanan scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum for shopper Clyde Dawson. It rang up at 67 cents and became the first product marked with a Universal Product Code to be scanned at a retail checkout.

The real story

The barcode itself was decades older. In 1949, engineer Joe Woodland, working with Bernard Silver, was reportedly sitting on Miami Beach thinking about Morse code. He pushed his fingers through the sand and dragged them towards him, turning dots and dashes into thick and thin lines. Their first design was a bull’s-eye of circles that could be read from any direction. They filed a patent in 1949 and it was granted in 1952.

The idea was ahead of its time. Cheap lasers and computers did not exist yet, so the concept sat waiting. By the early 1970s the grocery industry wanted a standard code, and a committee picked a design proposed by IBM engineer George Laurer, with Woodland among the team. Laurer’s version used the rectangular stripes we know today, and it was chosen as the industry standard in 1973.

Then someone had to go first. Marsh, a regional supermarket chain, installed the scanning equipment, and the gum went over the glass.

A small myth has grown around the gum itself. You may read that the Smithsonian has the original pack. According to Smithsonian Magazine, it never collected the actual gum. A replica has been displayed instead.

It was a team effort, too. Besides Laurer and Woodland, IBM’s William Crouse had invented the earlier bar code design that Laurer adapted, and Heard Baumeister proposed a layout that shrank the label down to a practical size. The first scan used an NCR register, which totted up the price without anyone typing it in. Today the descendants of that code sit on almost everything in a supermarket, from bananas to batteries.

Why people get it wrong

When people imagine a historic first scan, they picture a big, important grocery item, the sort of thing that fills a trolley. A cereal box or a can of soup feels like a worthy pioneer. A packet of gum sounds too trivial to be part of history, which is exactly what makes the real answer stick once you hear it.

“Fifty-odd years of beeping, and it all started with Juicy Fruit. I respect that. Some of my best work has also involved gum, though usually stuck to me.”