Notice: ean clean-up

Announced change to the ean field (UK Supermarket Price Scraper), 28 October 2026. Ships no earlier than 12 November 2026. From that release, ean stops carrying retailer-internal numbers: a retailer’s own product id padded to 13 digits; codes with six or more leading zeros; in-store and coupon codes (13-digit codes starting 2, codes starting 02, 04 or 05, and codes from 980 to 999); and 8-digit in-store codes starting 2. Manufacturer barcodes are unaffected.

More rows will have an empty ean. In the 4 October 2026 snapshots the share of rows with an empty ean goes from 0.9% to 3.4% at Tesco, from 0.0% to 15.9% at Sainsbury’s and from 1.1% to 3.2% at Asda. Aldi and Morrisons rows already carry none. Where ean is empty, join on matchKey.

The basket endpoint matches ean lines against the cleaned list. A line that uses a removed number becomes unmatched, and unmatched lines are never charged.

No input, default, price or event changes. The weekly shelf-price index does not read ean, so index values do not change.

If you join rows, or send basket lines, on ean, check them against the list above before 12 November 2026.