At precisely 8:01 a.m. on June 26, 1974, a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum made history. At a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, it became the first product ever scanned with a Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode. That simple beep heard 'round the grocery world changed retail forever.

The man behind the scanner was Clyde Dawson, head of research and development for Marsh Supermarkets. But his choice wasn't random—he deliberately selected the 10-pack of Juicy Fruit as a thank-you to Wrigley for their work supporting the UPC barcode system.

Why a Pack of Gum?

Dawson could have chosen anything on those shelves. Bread, milk, canned soup—but he went with gum. Beyond appreciating Wrigley's involvement in developing the UPC standard, there was a certain poetry to it. Gum was cheap, ubiquitous, and quintessentially American. It represented the everyday transactions that barcodes would streamline millions of times over.

That historic pack now sits in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, preserved alongside one of the original ten scanners from that Troy supermarket. It's a testament to how something as mundane as checking out at the grocery store became a technological revolution.

The Technology Behind the Beep

The winning UPC design came from George Laurer, who created the now-familiar pattern of vertical stripes paired with a 12-digit number. Spectra Physics built the laser scanner, while NCR provided the computerized cash register—a joint effort that brought the system to life.

Before barcodes, cashiers manually entered prices for every item. It was slow, error-prone, and inefficient. The UPC changed all that in an instant. That first scan took mere seconds but represented years of development and collaboration across industries.

The Retail Revolution

Today, over 10 billion UPC barcodes are scanned globally every single day. They're on everything from toothpaste to television sets, tracking inventory, preventing theft, and speeding up checkout lines worldwide.

The barcode didn't just make shopping faster—it transformed supply chains, enabled just-in-time inventory systems, and gave retailers unprecedented data about consumer behavior. All because someone scanned a pack of gum in Ohio.

So next time you hear that familiar beep at checkout, remember: it all started with Juicy Fruit. Not a bad legacy for a stick of chewing gum.

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