How to make your own barcodes for food storage

Store-bought food comes with a barcode. The food you put up yourself doesn't: jars from canning day, rice moved into buckets, soup frozen in bags. Your own labels with a code on them make that food as easy to track as anything from the store.

When your own codes help

• Home-canned food, with each batch's date on it.
• Bulk food you repack - the store bag and its barcode are gone.
• Food you decant into canisters: flour, sugar, pasta, cereal.
• Freezer food: meal prep, leftovers, meat from a butcher, garden produce.
• Homemade or market food: bread, jam, honey, farm eggs.

Anything that still has its store barcode doesn't need one.

QR codes or regular barcodes?

• QR codes are the easy choice: every phone camera reads them, and they can hold a link to the item's page or a few lines of text.
• Regular (striped) barcodes only hold a number, and need an app or a scanner that knows what the number means. If you make your own, use numbers starting with 2: that range is set aside for in-store use, so it won't clash with a product's real barcode.

Label each batch

Put the date on every label - the canning day, the day the bucket was packed, the day the soup went in the freezer. A code per batch, not just per food, means a scan tells you which jar is older, and you can use the oldest first.

Make labels that last

• Print codes at least ¾ inch (2 cm) square, with a white margin around them.
• Use labels made for where they're going: freezer-grade for the freezer (stick them on before freezing), waterproof for a damp basement, and removable or dissolvable for jars you reuse.
• On jars, label the side or the lid - lids get swapped, so the side is safer.
• Test one label with your phone before printing a whole sheet.

Make scanning part of the routine

• Scan when you take something out, so the count stays right.
• Scan when you shelve it, so you know where it went.
• Peel or cover the old label when a jar is reused, so an old code isn't scanned by mistake.