Wrigley was the company whose product became the first retail item scanned with a barcode in 1974.
On June 26, 1974, a 10-pack containing 50 sticks of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum was scanned at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The checkout scan took place at 8:01 a.m., and the register recorded a price of 67 cents. The gum was selected first from a cart containing other barcoded products, making it the historic first UPC scan.
The barcode itself was not invented by Wrigley. The Universal Product Code was developed for the grocery industry, with IBM contributing to the symbol design, while NCR supplied the scanning equipment used in the store. Wrigley’s role was supplying the product whose package carried the pioneering UPC.
The original gum packet is preserved at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Barcodes soon transformed retail by speeding checkout, improving inventory records, and reducing manual price-entry errors. The event is often remembered simply as “the first barcode scan,” though it was specifically the first retail scan using a UPC.