Comment by stronglikedan

But will it by ciphered by the manufacturer?

Tons of products already have all manner of information printed on them, but only the manufacturer can readily decrypt it.

This is a really good video explaining it. There is a good opportunity for someone more enterprising than I to stand up some infrastructure to support it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R32j6ZA3byI

That's bad ass

USDA inspected foods already carry markers with lot codes and factory identifiers. That is how food traceability works right now. Those values are pretty opaque to consumers though. The new 2D barcode rules seem to suggest that there will be a human readable value for the "Plant" that worked a food item, but I'm having difficulty cross referencing how this actually plays out. My reading is that the human readable value is only necessary for the next step in the chain, so a packaging company can partially obscure the human readable location value for the harvester, for example, though they will have a Plant code identifier of some sort.

If companies have a way of obscuring this info to end consumers while still meeting FDA obligations, they absolutely will, as they currently do for things like the information for companies who "Make" products right now, which are often holding companies meant to obscure business relationships.

Oh, and any human readable value will be obscured behind a QR code anyway, so all the humans who already do zero investigation to understand where their stuff comes from will continue to have no extra information.

Strict labeling laws around protected terms is an essential thing because so many people read nothing more than the packaging itself when shopping. All chicken lists "No hormones" as an advertisement despite that being law and no chicken sold will ever have those hormones.