The first patent for a bar code type product (US Patent #2,612,994) was issued to inventors Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver on October 7, 1952. The Woodland and Silver bar code can be described as a "bull's eye" symbol, made up of a series of concentric circles. Examine the 1958 patent drawing that depicts the Woodland's and Silver's barcode labels and the 1958 patent drawing of the inventors' bar code scanner technology. Due to the invention of Woodland's and Silver's, we can have today's U.P.C. bar code on a product package.

In 1948, Bernard Silver was a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia. A local food chain store owner had made an inquiry to the Drexel Institute asking about research into a method of automatically reading product information during checkout. Bernard Silver joined together with fellow graduate student Norman Joseph Woodland to work on a solution. Woodland's first idea was to use ultraviolet light sensitive ink. The team built a working prototype but decided that the system was too unstable and expensive. They went back to the drawing board. On October 20, 1949, Woodland and Silver filed their patent application for the "Classifying Apparatus and Method", describing their invention as "article classification...through the medium of identifying patterns”. This symbolize the first bar code was born, and that means the barcode labels will be used widely in stores in nearest further.

Barcode labels was first used commercially in 1966, however, it was soon realized that there would have to be some sort of industry standard set. By 1970, the Universal Grocery Products Identification Code or UGPIC was written by a company called Logicon Inc. The first company to produce bar code equipment for retail trade use (using UGPIC) was an American company Monarch Marking in 1970, and for industrial use, the British company Plessey Telecommunications was also first in 1970. UGPIC evolved into the Universal Product Code, which is still used in the United States. George J. Laurer is considered the inventor of U.P.C. or Uniform Product Code, which was invented in 1973. In June of 1974, the first U.P.C. scanner was installed at a Marsh's supermarket in Troy, Ohio. That means the invention of barcode step a big forward.