agree... I originally wrote this in my comment but pulled it out as I figured the thought of a national DB some people might scoff at -- but I have wanted this for decades
>>"POS's would need to be able to report each receipt with a QR code to a central (ideally government) FDA site and that information should be API accessible for the public."
this exists basically at very large scales with companies like nielseniq and to some degree Catalina marketing. If there was a way to make money off it, they could easily produce a lot of useful aggregate item pricing dbs by region over time.
Most people would not be fine if we had 3+ competing private db's with price info used to profit off of others lack of price knowledge.