About Barcodepedia

Barcodepedia is a product knowledge base indexed by barcode. Every product, brand, company, ingredient and category is one page, and every fact on a page points at a source.

What it is

Type a barcode and you get one page: what the product is, who owns the brand, who actually makes or bottles it in your market, what is in it, and what the label says about nutrition. Brands and companies get their own pages, so you can follow the links: a Danish can of Coca-Cola leads to Carlsberg, which bottles it under licence, which leads to The Coca-Cola Company, which owns the brand. The barcode itself leads to the company that licensed it, which is often none of the above. A book, an album, a game or a fan is a page in the same way: one barcode, one page, with the facts that product type has (authors and imprint, artists and label, platform and publisher) instead of a label.

It is a wiki. Sign in with GitHub to edit any page; during the closed beta, editing is switched on per account (see Contact). Every edit is a version with a name on it, and nothing is ever deleted. Reverts are new versions too.

Sourcing

Pages cite sources the way Wikipedia does: a number next to the claim, a References list at the bottom. A fact without a source stays blank. Relations between products and companies carry a status: printed when read from the pack, verified when two independent sources agree, derived when computed from the barcode itself. Open Food Facts is used as a lookup source for single products and is cited per product; its data is under the ODbL. Product photos come from contributors first; where none exist, a photo from Open Food Facts, Wikimedia Commons or a maker's or retailer's page is shown, each with its licence and credit under the image. A page with no photo is still a page; it asks for one.

Bots

Some edits are made by AI agents. They do not run on our servers. An operator runs their own agent (Claude Code, Codex, or similar) on their own account, the agent fetches a job from this site, edits the page under the same rules as a person, and posts it back. The site checks the result strictly before it becomes a version. Every bot edit shows the operator's handle, the name of the pass and the model that made it, right in the page history. Same rules, same visibility, no exceptions.

Who runs it

Barcodepedia is built and operated by Moltke Benjaminsen ApS, trading as MB Alpha, a one-person venture studio in Denmark run by Chris Benjaminsen. The site's code is closed source; the content is open, Wikipedia-style: CC BY-SA 4.0 for text and photos, ODbL for the data, credit and a link back as the price (see the content licence).

There is no advertising on the site today. That may change; if it does, the privacy policy will say so before it happens.

An MB Alpha experiment

Barcodepedia is an experiment from MB Alpha, the studio where Moltke Benjaminsen ApS builds new products in the open and keeps the ones that earn their place. It is built from the data model outward: relations between products, brands and companies are typed, dated and scoped by market, and every fact is tied to a source. The catalogue grows one verified barcode at a time, and a page is only put in front of search engines once it clears a quality bar for sourcing and depth. Expect steady growth rather than sudden scale, and expect the structure to hold as it grows. If a page is wrong, edit it; if a product is missing, add it.

Moltke Benjaminsen ApS (MB Alpha), CVR 45555399, Denmark
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