It started with a problem.
By the late 1960s, grocery industry executives recognized that labor costs at checkout were a growing problem and that automated scanning could help — but only if every product carried the same barcode format readable by every scanner. In 1970, a Symbol Selection Committee drawn from grocery manufacturers and retailers was formed to develop a standard. After evaluating multiple competing proposals, the committee selected a barcode format developed by IBM in 1973 as the Universal Product Code. The first commercial scan of a UPC barcode occurred on June 26, 1974, at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio — a ten-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum. GS1, which now manages the UPC and EAN standards globally, documents this history.
Historical sources below ↓Then something changed.
The UPC standard demonstrated that competing companies could agree on shared infrastructure that benefited the entire industry. Manufacturers, retailers, and equipment makers all had incentives to adopt the standard once critical mass was reached. The cost of the transition — new labels, new scanners, new systems — was justified by the operational savings at checkout: faster throughput, fewer pricing errors, and the ability to track sales at the item level. The standard also created new commercial intelligence: for the first time, retailers knew exactly what sold, when, and in what quantities.
What a builder can learn.
Our interpretation: the UPC standard succeeded because the coordination benefit outweighed the cost of agreeing on a single format. No single company could have achieved the same result unilaterally — the value came from universal adoption. For a business builder, this dynamic appears wherever interoperability matters: file formats, data standards, payment systems, communication protocols. Participating in the standard is often more valuable than having a proprietary alternative.
A door still open.
A hypothesis worth testing: if a small business identified a standard — a data format, a communication tool, a platform — used by most of its key partners or customers, and assessed whether its internal systems were fully interoperable with that standard, would it find friction points where non-compliance was creating extra work for both the business and its partners?
Which industry standard do your key customers or suppliers use most heavily — and does your business participate in it at the level they expect?
Follow the evidence.
History is sourced below. Business lessons are editorial interpretations; future possibilities are questions to test, not predictions.
Prepared from primary-source histories. First edition: 25 Sept 2026.