The concept of embossing numeric codes on the products represents the amount of commitment and dedication which the product manufacturer has put into manufacturing the specific product(s). One of the major advantages of numeric codes over other alphabetic codes is the script independence. Unlike the traditional alphabetic codes, the numeric codes use letters from the English alphabets, thereby making it suitable for people and systems using non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Devanagari, Greek and Japanese to use, understand and correctly interpret the code embossed on the products.
If you visit a grocery store, you’ll find that out of every 10 products, 7 of them carry a numeric code. Fruits and vegetables do not come with nutritional labels but they do contain stickers with some numeric codes embossed on them. These are the PLU-Price Look Up Code which contain pertinent information as to whether the fruit/vegetable was organically grown, genetically modified or produced using chemical fertilizers, herbicides or fungicides. Fruits and vegetables with PLU stickers containing 4 digits and beginning with a “3” or “4” are conventionally grown (i.e. these fruits/vegetables were sprayed with weed killers and chemical pesticides). PLU stickers having 5 digits and starting with “8” denote that the respective food product was genetically engineered (man intervened by manipulating the genes to produce a larger or brighter coloured food). To put it simply, numeric codes on products (especially food items) help the consumer learn a lot about the actual manner in which the respective products have been manufactured.
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