Which brand was the first commercial product to use the UPC barcode in 1974?

Wrigley's Juicy Fruit was the first commercial product to use a UPC barcode in 1974.

On June 26, 1974, a pack of Juicy Fruit gum was scanned at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The event demonstrated that a standardized machine-readable code could speed checkout and improve inventory tracking.

The Universal Product Code was developed in the United States by the grocery industry, with IBM engineer George Laurer designing the familiar linear symbol. The system uses black bars and white spaces to encode a product number rather than directly storing the product’s price.

The original pack of gum is preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. UPC technology later spread worldwide through related barcode standards, although the first retail scan remains associated with Wrigley’s gum.