By: Camille Samilton
October 21, 2026
Your flinty teeth clash perpetually against that bubbly, blowing, tropical-flavored Juicy Fruit—stretching its skin until it pops.
You gnaw on that moist fruit as the once vibrant color greys against your tongue—regressing in time as it attaches itself to that original swirling dark circular barcode.
Turning the page, on June, 26, 1974, a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Gum became the first product scanned using a UPC barcode in a retail store—in Troy, Ohio. This technology eventually became extremely common in retail stores and other businesses.
This UPC barcode, for example, can identify the type of Juicy Fruit, when scanned, but it does not identify an individual package as distinct from the pack.
When you scan an item in a store, their system can record the item sold, the time of sale, and the store’s location. All of this can be viewed on your receipt. Your receipt can be linked to a loyalty account (if you have one) or another type of record the store uses, associating with that specific customer or many customers over time who have or had similar purchases.
According to GS1, there are three types of product traceability that can happen: Identifying a product type, identifying a batch\pack, and identifying one specific item across time.
With type-one identification, every identical pack of Juicy Fruit shares the same barcode when scanned. This is the most common or conventional use in stores.
Type-two is batch-tracking a type of Juicy Fruit gum. This type can help retailers track or trace products if a recall happens or something happens that a quality investigation needs to take place.
Type-three is the individual item tracking a specific pack of Juicy Fruit. A serialized RFID tag can help separate that piece of gum from others. This tag is mostly used with medical equipment. If the tag is read and the information is recorded, the system can build a history of that item’s movements or whereabouts.
However, what exactly happens when you buy a product, and it leaves the store with you?
An ordinary UPC barcode doesn’t transmit signals or report where the product goes. A RFID tag, however, can be read by a compatible reader, but the proximity varies on the tag in use. Whether it still remains readable after someone purchases it depends on the type of tag and if it’s been deactivated.
Retail stores—such as Walmart—can also keep purchase history with customers’ accounts, depending on the store’s data practices and how they record transactions.
GS1 does take note of the possibility that RFID information could relay personal data. However, RFID tags are not like GPS trackers in a sense; they must be read by compatible equipment within range of the product. There is an important distinction between tracing a product and knowing who owns it—or where that person is every second.
When observing Store 1’s record information, they might show that 12 packs of gum were sold that day. This is good information for the store’s inventory management, but it does not necessarily have to identify each individual customer who purchased them.
Now, Store 2’s record information can show that a particular customer purchased gum at a specific time and store location; this information can be used as a data collection tool.
The Federal Trade Commission also warns in their article that shopping apps can collect purchase and location information. However, not every store retailer collects or connects dots with the same type of information. These practices can be different by each company and are described in their privacy policy.
The gum loses its flavor, the color, and the shape. There is nothing left but the memory of the sweetness.
The barcode doesn’t taste like anything, nor do the stripes remember. They don’t have to; they only need the flashing red scanner and the coding beneath.
