THE HUMBLE FORTUNE COOKIE has had a makeover. A German biscuit company has created QKies, a box of bake-it-yourself cookies iced with ricepaper QR codes that lead to a YouTube video, Flickr photo or personalised webpage. It’s yet another diverse (and, perhaps for the first time, delicious) step for QR codes, the bar code of the digital age.

The relative success of QR codes comes down to the fact that they are open-source. Kind of. QR codes were invented by a subsidiary of Toyota, Denso Wave, in Japan in 1994 as an easy way to keep track of car parts and access data quickly. Denso Wave owns the technology but has never implemented its patent to prevent others from adapting QR codes, so contributing to their wider popularity. The codes now appear on everything from event posters to property advertisements and promotional material, directing people online from an offline source. QKies might be a gimmick, and QR codes are already being surpassed by smarter, augmented-reality ways of accessing product information, but their progress has marked the biggest change ever to bar codes. And now you can eat them.