But GS1, a nonprofit standards organisation that provides the numbers, says on its website the prefixes cannot be used to determine a product's country of origin. “The GS1 Prefix does not ...

Barcodes are used to identify products in stores and provide information to a computer system and verify product authenticity.

Consumers were concerned when they noticed that the barcode on bottles of Valpré water does not start with ‘600’, the code for South Africa.

What some companies did instead of directly purchasing barcodes was to sniff out dormant GS1 prefixes and resell them. They did not have access to the original GS1 account, nor access to the necessary ...