Just a silly thing I’ve wondered about occasionally. Say I buy a bag of 20 clementines or a package of asparagus spears at the supermarket. How close to each other can I assume the contents were grown/picked? Is it a good bet that the clementines came from the same farm? Might any of them have come from the same tree? Was the asparagus from the same plant, or the same row?
I imagine that packaging varies depending on the produce and the size of the grower. But I didn’t know if - for example - apples or oranges went to a central processing facility, where all similarly graded fruits are considered fungible.
There is obviously some ability to track origin, as indicated when contamination is found.
Depending on what produce you’re talking about and where you buy it it will come from the same packing house.
My brother in law works in a large lemon packing house in southern California.
Basically a truck load of lemons will show up from a given farm and they will go through the packing process, spraying, cleaning and packaging but the load from the farmer probably wont exactly fit in the package going out to the store (typically a pallet) so the remainder will be held over and combined with the front of the next load.
They get loads from various farms all season long and bins are dumped one at a time in the order they show up at the line so there is no intention to create mixes but it happens at the front and rear of every load. Once those pallets make it to a receiving facility they may be combined with other pallets before they get sent to the stores so on a shelf there is no way to tell that the package came from the same farm as the one next to it or in the contents of the package are all from the same farm. It is probable that all of the contents came from the same bin on the same farm. The ways that bins are filled depends on the farmer. Generally, they will pick a ripe section of orchard and each worker will get a tree until they finish and move on to the next one but some operations will have multiple pickers dumping into the same bin other will give each guy his own bin it depends on how they are paying the pickers. For most fruit a bin is a half ton and you can get about 350-400 pounds per mature tree (lemon) so there are at least two trees in a bin if not three.
Your grocery store bag of lemons could be from the same tree to from 6 trees between two different farms. I just went through this due to the salmonella contamination since he does food safety for his packing house. Lemons are graded in the field by the bin between juice grade and retail. Actually I think there were 4 grades but that was the distinction I remember.
An example from my past. As a kid I picked berries in the summer: straw/rasp/black-berries.
I worked for one of many farms in the area. They all sent their berries to the same packing plant. (These would be frozen or otherwise processed. Not for sale as fresh.)
So the berries in a package, jar of jam or whatever could be a mix from several different farms in the area. But with batches coming in, most would be from one farm. Only when the end of batch from one farm was followed by a batch from another would there be significant mixing. Unless the berries were stored in bulk for major buyers. Then all bets are off.
Had an uncle with a filbert farm. His nuts went to a big storehouse with nuts from other farms for storage and later shipping. Lots of mixing there. Same with grains from wheat farmers and such.
Also had relatives in the dairy business. Definitely nothing there to prevent mixing from a lot of farms. (They did did some testing on batches from farms before putting into the big tanks.)
We tend to read the labels on watermelons during their season and they will sometimes state which farm they came from.
If you bought apples from my grandfather’s road side stand in the 1950s he could take you into the orchard and show you the exact tree! It was a small orchard and several varieties only had a single tree. I remember the yellow apples (Yellow Transparent?) as they made such good pies. They were always in demand when they ripened.
You know how turkeys come with a bag of “gut materials” (the neck and livers and gizzards and the like). I always wondered if the bag of guts was from the same turkey or assembled from the guts of other turkeys.
Thanks. What you say about fruit makes perfect sense - and I imagine is similar for many veggies. I SW Mich, in fall, you often see trucks loaded up with bins of various fruit. Makes perfect sense that such truckloads would be processed in the order they come in, such that a package would tend to contain fruit from the same farm at least. Unless you are talking about something as sturdy as nuts, I imagine you’d want to minimize the handling of the produce. Apples or strawberries are quite different from grain, which is stored in elevators before being shipped to processors, etc.
Not only from different cows but from many different dairy farms. There are local dairies that are part of the Tillamook group of dairies. The truck comes around and picks up the milk from the holding tanks at several dairies, so it is blended within the truck, then delivers it to the creamery in Tillamook, where it is pumped into even larger holding tanks, blended with even more.
I have to think bruise-able fruit like apples, oranges, peaches are going to be handled as little as possible until they get put into crates. It looks like they stay in the crates until the get to the grocery store. So a crate would probably have to be from the harvest from a single farm. Unless they had a few stray fruit and popped them in. Nuts, milk, orange juice, anything in a can, those are probably blended and re-blended.
Depends on the produce - some things are literally picked/cut and boxed up in the fields. Lettuce and strawberries work like that. So you might end up with mostly one plant’s produce in one box.
Others are basically picked, put in a truck, and then taken to a big central facility where they’re graded, then boxed up, etc… Lemons, peaches, apples and almonds worked like this- they’re picked, graded and then either boxed and sold, or stored for later sale. In this case, you’re getting a mixed bag from the entire harvest, or potentially multiple harvests.
Go to youtube and search for say… lettuce harvesting, and you’ll see videos of how it’s done.
Not in a crate from a farm. They are taken to the processor, cleaned, graded, sorted, etc. Some apples might get an extra coat of wax. Some grapefruit might get a shot of coloring. Etc. So the batches that come into the the plant might not correspond to batches coming out of the plant.
Remember, in a crate from a farm some fruits might be good enough for eating whole, others are for canning, etc. No crate coming in would be lucky enough to have just one grade. (Unless they were all going to be canned/frozen/whatever.)
Many fruits are kept in special storage for sale out of season. Apples are often stored but so can other fruits like pears and oranges.
When needed, they’re taken out of storage and sent to wholesalers.
This makes me remember Julie Child on her The French Chef show. She was on a field trip to a chicken processing plant, where they cleaned, chilled, and packaged chicken pieces. She turned to her tour guide and said, “I always wondered what kind of chicken has two left legs”.
sometimes youre lucky if all the oranges in a bag/box come from the same country ……
ive gotten gift crates of oranges that say “oranges might come from CA Florida Mexico south America Australia and china”