Agreed! We had an interesting structural debate about the value of products as assets versus products as taxonomy terms associated with their location.
Not necessarily a right answer there, but things worth testing, thanks for sharing your application also to know these thoughts have broader needs.
Hey there! Great to reconnect @gbathree . Yup, it was me!
Sorry, bit late to the party & feel free to point me somewhere else, if this has moved on.
Couple of notes:
VOCbench: DFC has itâs own instance now⌠which you can find at vocbench[dot]datafoodconsortium[dot]org [Apparently, Iâm not trustworthy enough to put more than 2 links in a post, so youâll have to cut & paste that one 
]. We also have ShowVOC - which doesnât require a login, and allows you to browse the Ontology & Taxonomies.
The PHP Connector is now available, which could support/accelerate you creating the serializer/endpoints required.
What it doesnât do is support the OIDC integration, but there are Drupal modules for that, right! 
FYI I opened a pull request to propose adding a Product asset type + Product type vocabulary to farmOS core: Add a Product asset type and Product type taxonomy by mstenta ¡ Pull Request #787 ¡ farmOS/farmOS ¡ GitHub
Update: the Product asset type pull request was merged, and farmOS v3.1.0 was released on Friday. Product assets are officially part of the farmOS core data model now! 
Just a first step⌠(see my comment in this other thread)