>>>Now I don't know whether this was from someone's wishlist (like that grocery tricorder remains on mine) or such an app really exists, but I find lots of trouble in the last sentence. The barcode database would have to be public, freely accessible via a web service, up-to-date and... the "everything you want to know" would be subject to interests of those supplying the data. They would tell you whatever they think you want to hear, and you'd think you were checking the facts...
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>>I think you might be remembering 2D QR codes, which can encode a URL. Trouble is/was they are/were being used to encode URLs to malicious sites. A regular 1D bar code doesn't encode enough characters to represent a URL, plus it typically has its alpha equivalent printed beneath it, =safe(ish). QR codes are like riding a bicycle through a puddle.
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>No, I meant the barcode. The story went with "you find an item, or just a piece of wrapper with the barcode, you point your phone's camera to it, click somewhere and it tells you which item it was - item name, manufacturer, perhaps a link to their website". Now considering that this story should be about six years old now (or older), I wonder whether anyone really did that and what database did it connect. If not, well, there's a market for such an app, isn't there?

If I Google [upc ean database] I get lots of hits, such as https://www.barcodelookup.com/ .