Industrial Barcodes
Case, carton, and warehouse-level barcodes. Choose a format below to generate one for free — no sign-up required.
About industrial barcodes
Industrial barcodes label the box, not the thing inside it. A carton of ninety-six units gets one ITF-14 identifying the carton as a unit of trade, while each item inside keeps its own retail barcode — which is how a warehouse can receive a pallet with a handful of scans instead of hundreds.
The formats here are shaped by the surface they are printed on. Corrugated cardboard prints badly: ink spreads, edges blur, and the flutes distort the bars. ITF-14 answers that with wide bars, generous tolerances and a heavy bearer bar framing the symbol, which stops a scanner reading a partial code as a complete one when the beam clips the edge. Interleaved 2 of 5 is the underlying numeric format, and requires an even number of digits — an odd count is padded with a leading zero rather than rejected. MSI turns up mostly on shelf-edge and inventory labels.
Print size matters more here than anywhere else on this site. ITF-14 has a defined magnification range, and a symbol shrunk to fit a label design is the single most common reason a carton fails to scan at goods-in.
Industrial Barcodes — frequently asked questions
They identify different things. The product carries a GTIN-13 or GTIN-12 for the saleable unit; the carton carries a GTIN-14, which is the same product number with an indicator digit in front saying what kind of pack it is. Scanning the carton tells a system how many units arrived, which scanning one item cannot.