Show HN: Barcode Scanner to check if a product is European

(Canadian citizen) I have been looking for something like this but essentially checking if a product is _not_ American. The existing apps &#x2F; tools seem to be mostly garbage using AI which tends to hallucinate -- the more obscure the product, the worse it is -- or filled with ads.<p>Personally, I&#x27;d love to see a little more regulation wrt where &amp; how a product must show a Made in &#x2F; Product of label. It should be front-and-center. I shouldn&#x27;t have to scan through the mess of ingredients, nutritional facts, etc on the back to try to spot something that isn&#x27;t even always there.

Ha this took me down a rabbit hole. I once did food packaging design and we had to sort out correct labelling including the barcode so I had vague memories of the barcode system.<p>If I’m not mistaken, food packaging is generally labelled worldwide with the same primary bar code type, which specifically is the GS1 standard. Maybe in your head “a normal product barcode”.<p>More here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gs1.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gs1.org</a><p>Seems the country of origin, is encoded into the barcode spec using a 3 digit ISO country code format.<p>I’ve not yet worked out which digits..<p>But practically once worked out it should be easily determined with a knowing read of the code in numbers (look for the number X which is Y digits in) sort of thing.<p>Or equally fairly trivial to make a scanner app that reports the country of origin or visually responds to certain counties of origin.<p>Deeper spec here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ref.gs1.org&#x2F;standards&#x2F;genspecs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ref.gs1.org&#x2F;standards&#x2F;genspecs&#x2F;</a><p>I found country of origin stuff on page 178, but doing this on my phone haven’t yet worked out .. how many digits across the county of origin code is stored.<p>Section titled “3.7.1.5 Country of Origin of a Trade Item”.