"729"
Barcode of Israel?
Alerts regarding identifying Israeli products by their
barcode
have been circulated over the internet, one example is
shown below:
Boycott
"729" Barcode
Most of the products have a barcode to identify
them. Each
barcode contains a lot of information such as the
factory and
also the country where it is produced.
The following system is not necessarly waterproof but
will certainly
allow you to screen a lot of products coming from
Israël.
You can retrieve the list of these countries and the
according
numbers on the internet.
Some examples :
383 EAN Slovenija
471 EAN Taiwan
Notice that these one have NOTHING to do with Israël.
A barcode starting with "729" indicates that this
product
is produced in Israël
729 Israeli Bar Code Association - EAN Israel
Don"t buy them if you want to protest against the
current agression!!
Sometimes brands are misleading, a barcode never lies
if it carries
that 729 !!!
Others have added more targets to the barcode boycott
list:
The American ones start with 00 till 13.
But upon investigating the barcodes of know Israeli goods
people
found the barcodes weren"t always correct:
The Israeli bar code story is not so simple. I
purchased several
food items from Israel to investigate which could be
from the
occupied territories. The Achdut Tahini from Industrial
Zone Barkan
(Occupied Territories) starts out: 7 219.... Pri-Vayerek
Olives
from Industrial Zone Har Tov starts: 7 922... (Barbet
(Jam)
imported from Israel by Supreme Foods of Concord Ont.: 6
507...)
I notice that foods from Sweden start out with either a
7 or
an 8, so there is no consistant labeling for some
countries. As
a matter of fact, I notice that the first number is not
consistantly
the same on goods from any particular country; foods
from Canada
usually start with a 6, but not always.
There must be a better way to tell...
Then someone investigated what EAN (the barcode number)
actually
mean. From the EAN international FAQ:
http://www.ean-int.org/faqadc.html
Does the
EAN number
indicate the country of origin of a product?
No, the numbering of a product with EAN numbers does
not imply
any significance. An EAN number simply starts with the
prefix
of the member organisation that has allocated a bank of
numbers
to a company. This does not mean that the product was
manufactured
in a specific country or by a specific manufacturer.
So where does this leave us?
We recommend you read all the labels and not rely on
the barcode
as it clearly does not indicate the country of origin
although
it might be accurate on many occasions.
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