You can’t tell, just by looking at it, how old an egg is. So when you’re buying eggs at a store, how can you tell which cartons have the freshest eggs?
You look at the carton.
Cartons have a three-digit number printed on the side, from 001 to 365 — or 366 in leap years. As you have already cleverly intuited, the number corresponds with the number of days that have passed since the beginning of the year. A carton with the number 054 on the side, therefore, would have been packaged on Feb. 23.
