UPC stands for "Universal Product Code", which was the original barcode used in the United States and Canada. The UPC (now officially EAN.UCC-12 is a numerical method of identifying products without redundancy worldwide for all types of products in the retail sector. The EAN is a superset of the original UPC increasing the digits to 13 with the prefix 0 reserved for UPC. As of 2005, manufacturers are only allowed to use the new 13-digit codes on their items, rather than having two separate numbers.