From now on, you can print your own barcodes

Label homemade items with a barcode to easily keep track of inventory, expiration dates, and storage locations.

Most purchased items already have a barcode

Most packaged foods in Europe are labeled with a barcode for commerce. In this case, the barcode is the machine-readable version of a globally unique number (GTIN) that allows products to be identified repeatedly throughout the supply chain. More information on this can be found in this Blog article on the topic of barcodes.

In the supermarket, the payment process at the checkout is greatly simplified by a barcode. When the cashier scans the item at the checkout, there is a short beep. This is the confirmation that the reading process was successful. Through the barcode, the cash register system finds the stored product name, the stored price, and any price reductions.

In larger supermarkets, there is even an inventory management system connected that automatically reduces stock levels and can generate an order when a certain quantity of goods is reached.

Why equip homemade items with a barcode?

By uniquely identifying products by the manufacturer, all sorts of additional information can be stored in databases. Besides the price, as mentioned in the previous section, information about manufacturing, packaging, recycling tips, the Nutri-Score, a sustainability score, nutritional values, and much more can be saved.

This is what makes the use of barcodes interesting in the Speisekammer App as well! Here, additional attributes to the barcode are stored in a database, including the storage location at home, the quantity on hand, the minimum shelf life, a description, and even a photo.

So by scanning a product at home, you can manage your household much more easily with barcodes. You scan a product with the Pantry App and immediately have the following information at a glance:

• Inventory
• Product photo
• Storage location
• Expiration date

This also makes it interesting for homemade products - after all, it is advantageous here as well if you can record your inventory, storage location, expiration date (or possibly the production date) and a photo. In the following section, we will show you how you can skillfully label your products at home with barcodes at a low cost.

And how do I now create a barcode for my homemade jam?

To create a barcode, you need three things:

A unique identifier for your product

A barcode generator

Paper (preferably self-adhesive) and a printer

The unique identifier for your product

Typical identifiers in commerce are EAN8 and EAN13, which are 8-digit and 13-digit numbers, respectively. Unfortunately, by looking at them, you cannot tell what product they represent. If you use a Code 128 instead, you can also use letters for identification. The advantage is that you can directly see what is encoded on the printed label.

For the Pantry App, we have decided to limit ourselves to uppercase letters. So you can use any conceivable word as an identifier, provided you write it in uppercase. For example:

• TOMATOES
• PRE-COOKED
• STRAWBERRY JAM

A barcode generator

Next, you feed your identifier into a barcode generator. This creates a printable graphic from the identifier. There are some free barcode generators on the internet. You can find the one we used for this article further down.

Paper (preferably self-adhesive) and printer

Now print the barcodes you created with your printer. If you use self-adhesive address labels, you can easily apply them to your freezer bags, canning jars, and cans. For example, you can order these through Amazon (affiliate link):

AVERY Zweckform 3652-10 Address Labels (210 stickers, 70x42.3 mm on A4, printable return labels, self-adhesive address labels with ultragrip, ideal for home office) 10 sheets, white

Some examples for downloading

As an example, we have generated some barcodes for you that you can print out and use:

Various examples of barcodes for homemade items. You can print these out and stick them on your homemade products.

If you can't find what you're looking for, you can easily create more for free at Tec-IT yourself. Simply select "Code-128" and make sure to use only uppercase letters so that the Pantry App can read the barcodes:

Free Online Barcode Generator: Code-128Free Code-128 Generator: This free online barcode generator creates all 1D and 2D barcodes. Download the generated barcode as bitmap or vector image.Barcode Generator

Alternatives to Code128

There are also Code 11, EAN8, EAN13, QR Codes... why is Code 128 being used in this blog article?

It doesn't matter whether you use Code 39 or Code 128, they have the following advantages:

• The identifier consists of letters, so you can directly recognize by the label what kind of product it is
• The barcode includes a check digit that makes the scanning process more robust
• The barcode can be read with simple single-line (1D) scanners

Unfortunately, there is no room for additional information within the barcode itself, as it would quickly become too long.

EAN8/EAN13

If it's not important for you to be able to read the label to know what it's about, you can also use EAN8 or EAN13. These barcodes also contain a check digit. To ensure that you don't accidentally use the same barcode as food manufacturers with your own barcode, there are so-called "in-house" codes. These always start with "2" and can otherwise be chosen freely. So here you also have a huge stock of barcodes that you can read with a 1D scanner. Another advantage is the fixed width of the barcode. This is especially important when there is limited printing space on the product.

QR Codes

QR codes are quite modern compared to their predecessors; they were developed in Japan in 1994. The advantage is that there is a lot of space within the barcode itself - up to 4296 characters. When using digits, even 7089 characters can fit.

Here, information such as product name, product size, nutritional values, and much more can be directly stored. It also contains correction data for a robust scanning process and can be read quickly. The downside of the QR code is that it requires a 2D scanner.

Conclusion

In this article, we have shown you how to equip your homemade products with barcodes using fairly simple means, so that you can manage them more easily with the Pantry App. This way, you can also easily manage inventory for homemade items, add photos, and much more.

We have limited ourselves to simple 1D barcodes (Code 128) that can also be read by basic scanners.

Have fun trying it out!