Serious question: Have you ever really looked at the packaging of the food products that you buy at the store?

Including some manner of descriptive coding isn't necessarily universal, but it has nonetheless been a normal way of doing things for a very long time.

It's similar to email headers or ip:port pairs in that it's hidden in plain sight. It's also similar in that most folks just don't notice them, and wouldn't care if they did notice them.

For instance: Plain old soda cans, which my dad made countless billions of during his career. There was a time when a person could show him a random 12oz soda can and there was a very strong chance that he'd be able to identify its origin by looking at it.

And I don't mean just the company that produced it, or the specific manufacturing plant within that company.

He could deduce the date of production, the line on which it was produced, the bodymaker within that line that did the metal stamping, whether it was made during the day or night shift, and (with a calendar) which crew was working during that particular shift.

And that's just the can itself.

The origin of the contents of the can are also generally available for anyone with the right knowledge to observe, usually with videojet printing on the can's dome. He wasn't in the can-filling business so he wasn't much help with those codes, but they were present.

But again, on any normal day: No normal person ever even notices the presence of this information.

Taylor Farms isn't an outlier here with their labelling at all.