upc on plastic bottels

[ejmaple]

was wondering about upc 's on plastic bottels. i currently use sugarhill ma. assc. bottels and they do not have upc 's. i'am looking to expand sales, and some stores i've talked to would love to sell local syrup but need upc on bottels to scan for price. so what have others done? is there other brands of bottels that have upc already?

thanks ed

[wiam]

I think this is something the producer must do because it is tied to that producer.

[gmcooper]

You have to register for your own UPC codes for each size and type of container. You can have them custom printed on the jugs or use a printed sticker with codes for each. If I remember it wasn't that difficult to get set up.

[maplefrank]

we had some stickers made up, my wife found a good place, a one timefee, and you can print them if you want, we ordered 100......

[ejmaple]

thanks guys, i'll do a search

[Mark]

To sign up through the government I paid a little over $700 one time fee and a yearly fee of about $300. You can change the last two digits so that gives you a hundred different codes.
You could also buy just a code from a reseller on the web. That would work as long as they pay the yearly fees on them or they could be reissued.
If you go the government route you can print the bar codes off their site with Avery labels, that is what I did until I had them printed on the jugs.

[maplefrank]

http://www.simplybarcodes.net/?gclid=CN6Mqeu2l64CFUETNAodRRwMLw

[Mark]

I took a look at simply bar codes and they twist the truth a little about the company prefix. If you put the bar code number into a company search you will come up with that company and not yours. It all depends how big you want to get. If you buy seven bar codes you are already up to what it costs to do it the right way. Also if I was going to have jugs silk screened with the bar code I would be worried about a problem at a later date. If you get into a large grocery chain they could ask to see the proof that you are the original subscriber of that bar code. There are only two or three resellers of codes that are legal, they bought up a bunch of codes before a law was created to prohibit that. If you are only doing a few products it would probably work fine.

I have one store that was putting bar codes on my syrup before I did. There is a series of numbers that is never sold and is used for that purpose. The store would assign a number just for their store and print them at the store. I don't know of any other stores doing that. You could look that up and see what series it is. Just pick a number and make labels. I bet you would not run into a problem as long as the store was not assigning their own bar code numbers for locale products.