When purchasing fruits and vegetables, I believe, for most, freshness is of priority. However, buyers may not have a keen eye for discerning a particular fruit’s freshness nor even its edibility – considering that vendors do wax-coat their apples, brush and fluff their pears so that they appear to be fresh. Peas and other greens are dipped in dye for a ‘greener’ look – not to mention the practice of having ground meat warped in plastic bags made for that specific purpose of diminishing the grayish look of dated meat. The truth is, trust of vendors is neither necessarily an affordable nor a worthy practice.

This is where the concept of the Fresh Code comes in. Conceived from the folks at Yanko Design, this bar code diminishes gradually based on the freshness of a particular item. It intelligently displays through a graph the freshness level of the item as time passes until it reaches ‘0′ indicating that item should be thrown away.

Beneficial to any supermarkets, another purpose might include lessening all together the vendors effort at managing products saleability through this improved visualization of freshness. I for one would find its implementation very useful, which would include alleviating doubts of my veggie freshness through a similar achievable standardized concept.