Documented, sourced, and never invented. One clause at a time.
The tag sewn into every new mattress swears, in all caps, that removing it breaks the law. California's own statute says otherwise; it names the buyer as the one person the rule was never written for. Here's the state-by-state history of a warning almost nobody actually has to worry about.
No federal rule requires a 'refrigerate after opening' label on ordinary condiments. The phrase's closest documented ancestor is a 1997 FDA guidance that FDA itself called nonbinding, and that gap is exactly why the words are everywhere.
California's most recognizable warning sentence isn't in the statute at all. It's regulatory safe-harbor text layered on top of a 1986 ballot initiative, revised once in 2018 for specificity, and pierced once, for coffee, by litigation.
Nearly every popular retelling traces this phrase to a single 1934 lawsuit and says MGM coined it on the spot. The court record backs the lawsuit and leaves the phrase's actual wording, timing, and legal power considerably murkier.
Three phrases you obey daily. With one exception, no federal law requires any of them, or says what they mean.
Three words that turn a crime into a marketing campaign.
The warning on the back of the bag protects the company more reliably than it protects you, and that isn't an accident.