PLU Codes and What they mean

As you pull out the food from the grocery store you wonder why they bother to put those little stickers on each and every peach. They are hard to take off but tell you a wealth of knowledge if only you can decipher the code. The glue on these stickers is food safe but don’t eat the sticker.
Those little stickers are called the PLU code or the price lookup number that speed you out at the checkout stand. This little code also tells you how the fruit was grown. You can tell if the fruit was genetically modified, organically grown or produced with chemical fertilizers, fungicides, or herbicides. All this valuable information that you did not even know you had.

Here is the code breaker:
Conventionally grown (grown with chemicals) PLU code consists of four numbers.
Organically grown fruit A five-numeral PLU prefaced by the number 9.
Genetically engineered (GM) fruit A five-numeral PLU prefaced by the number 8.

The numeric system was developed by the Produce Electronic Identification Board, an affiliate of the Produce Marketing Association, a Newark, Delaware-based trade group for the produce industry.

I try always to buy as much food as I can that starts with a 9. The next best is anything that does not start with a 8. While all food is to some extent genetically modified by cross pollination and selective breading, I prefer that it be done the natural way and not by the manual transfer of genes of one species to another.