How do they put those labels on every single piece of fruit larger than a grape? How can it be stopped?
I like to eat the skin of some fruit—peaches, nectarines, etc. Those labels have to be pulled off and sometimes they take skin with it before it is ripe. It usually doesn’t ripen properly after that.
I also like to compost vegetative matter, but I hate it when all those labels show up in my yard after I’ve put down some compost.
I’ve wondered how they can manage to put a label on every single piece of fruit. Do machines do this?
How can this be stopped?
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19 Answers
Unless you can get congress to rewrite their law requiring those labels on every piece of fruit sold, you can’t stop it.
I agree with you about how pointless it is.
I agree that it is to some point redundent. What does the label on one apple tell you that the labels on the other however many apples don’t manage to get across.
We should just be happy that they use stickers on the fruit rather than packaging it in order to “brand” it.
Most of the times, those labels have the number for the cashier to put into the register to ring up your produce. They try to put it on all of them because you never know which ones someone will take to the register.
I’ve never had a problem getting the stickers off. I just take them off when I wash my produce.
Buy bags of fruit – no individual labels. It’s cheaper, too. Although besides apples and oranges, I guess most fruit is not sold in bags.
And you got me thinking – often I buy from fruit and vegetable stands and little ethnic grocery stores. I can’t recall if they have all the labels. I’ll have to pay attention.
In one’s wildest dreams, a label on every piece of fruit would seem preposterous. And still does. Every time I peel one off and throw it away, I wonder how much it has driven up the cost of fruit, how silly the workers must feel as they apply them, and how ugly a bowl of fruit looks with labels on them. Do the banana labels get put on in Jamaica, or must they be labelled in the US? If a fruit is full of e coli, does one sue the person whose label is on the fruit?
AAAARRRGGHHH! What stupidity!
@anartist Actually, the labels are useful when there are outbreaks of illness, it can be tracked back to the source for a recall.
Why would anyone fill a bowl of fruit without washing it first, and removing the labels at that time?
I didn’t know it was the law. Weird.
So all the labels are put on by hand? Maybe it was make-work legislation. If only we could get paid for taking the labels off!
Maybe I should eat my fruit in the form of juice? Hard to label each orange in orange juice.
With regard to your specific problem, why do you take the sticker off before you are ready to eat the piece of fruit? Wait until you are going to eat it, then take the sticker off and throw it away. This will prevent you from removing skin prematurely and will prevent the sticker from winding up with your compost. It doesn’t eliminate the stickers altogether, of course, but it’s at least a practical solution to the issues you’re having.
As for why individual pieces are labeled, it’s because the labels have the product’s produce code on them. This ensures that the produce code is always present come scanning time even if the customer is only buying a single piece of fruit. You’ll notice that there is an exception for bananas: each individual banana does not get a sticker. This is because bananas are always put under a single code and are purchased so frequently that everyone knows the code by heart (4011). Apples, on the other hand, have different codes for each variety; and peaches, nectarines, and other fruits aren’t purchased enough for cashiers to memorize their numbers.
At my local grocery store, however, there has been a decrease in what gets labeled as rolling lists that have the produce type and code listed on them have been installed at each register (including the self-service ones). So perhaps the day of the sticker is slowly coming to an end. But if there really is a law about labeling fruit, I suppose that will have to get changed first. It can’t be too stringent, however, as the banana case shows.
Frankly, I don’t see this as a problem at all. As @Seaofclouds correctly pointed out, the labels are to help cashiers know what to ring up, because the range of produce sold in supermarkets is so extraordinarily wide and varied (WIN !). Many cashiers simply wouldn’t know what variety of apple you have, so the labels save lots of time at the register (WIN !).
In addition, without a label she won’t know whether you have the run-of-the-mill Granny Smith apples or the organic variety. If you’re the kind of customer who cheats (people do, you know), then you could fill a bag with the organics and include a single labeled run-of-the-mill apple, and pay the lower price for all the rest. So labels help to prevent shrinkage (WIN !).
I can’t imagine that the labels are applied by hand.
Labels? What labels? No wonder some of my fruit has an off taste !
As Euell Gibbons once said ”“Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible. ...” It’s just paper and a little glue, chase it down with some Apple juice.
I suspect the label application jobs were outsourced to some low wage third world country many years ago !!!
Hand or machine? I really am curious about how they do it.
Back in the day practically every item in the grocery store had a price on it. Every piece of fruit is nothing compared to that.
For self checkout it is very helpful.
@jaytkay I think sometimes it must be, because they seem to put the label right over the imperfection. Lol.
As @YARNLADY pointed out, those labels are pretty important to identifying bad (e.g., E. coli infested) batches of produce after they’ve already been shipped and sold.
@jaytkay Wow! Amazing! Thank you for those links! Makes me imagine one of those horror films where the labelers somehow break out and run around the world labeling people with weird and apparently inappropriate labels. Whatever you were labeled, that’s how you had to act and that’s how much money you could make and etc, etc. It could be a kind of “why can’t we all get along thing.”
What a netaphor metaphor! Maybe it wouldn’t be half bad if it did happen.
I too get annoyed with trying to gently wash and lift the damned labels. It’s tough wanting to offer a nice looking, ripe, clean piece of fruit to someone when it has a little gouge taken out. ARRRRGH! I guess from now on I’ll think of it as offering that I care to do my part to combat E Coli.~
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