You made the statement in the context of the currently discussed article, where not trusting the companies and obtaining samples from supermarkets would have be

You made the statement in the context of the currently discussed article, where not trusting the companies and obtaining samples from supermarkets would have been at least as easy and cheap. That makes it a bit hard to understand what your point is, we have a concrete example, there is no need to theorize about other scenarios. What you came up with has little or no connection to the item being discussed.