I know a food packager who pays to have a huge dumpster full of vegetable peels, rinds, seeds and guts hauled away weekly as trash. He could sell it for animal feed, at a minimum get it taken away for free for that purpose, but he’s afraid of liability issues. They may be imagined issues, but I can understand his caution, he doesn’t want a pig farmer suing him because all his livestock got sick from some kind of contamination. Certainly he’d have to make sure his employees weren’t throwing other trash in that dumpster, especially cleaning products.
That’s what I meant by my first sentence. Walmart is not in the ‘used’ produce business. If they were consistently getting bruised lemons they would not ‘make lemonade’ with them to try and make a profit, they would simply switch lemon wholesalers.
You are correct, but to a very small extent in our company. Most of what goes into our cut fruit, juice and smoothies are perfectly saleable fruit. Sometimes at a slightly different stage of ripeness.
Juicing oranges aren’t sold as oranges. They are a different variety. Their skin looks rather mottled, if that’s the word I’m looking for.
That would depend on whether you mean multicolored or not.
Yes we do, and sell it for more than double the packaged stuff. In salsa the price difference is even bigger.
We do us a small amount of “cosmetically unsaleable” fruit and vegetable for these purposes, but the cost of the tomatoes, onions, chiles, etc in the salsa is less than 10% of the retail price. Labor is several times that. The waste of unsold store-made products is very high, since they usually have to be sold eitger same day or next day. The packaged salsa may be good for ten days of two weeks.
Actually, it’s kind of the opposite - oranges with brown spots are sorted out in the packing plant to be sent to juicers because consumers tend to prefer “unblemished” fruit. While Valencias are the primary juicing oranges in the US (because they’re juicy!), they are readily available as fresh fruitas well. The “pretty” ones are cleaned, polished and often waxed to make them look their absolute best before being shipped to your local grocer.
Here’s a previous thread about it:
Sounds like it varies from chain to chain and store to store. And it’s not the cost of the ingredients so much as the cost of labor. It seems unlikely that, for example, a store is making cookies in house. More likely they are getting the dough shipped in and bake them in the store. I’ve never seen an employee cracking eggs and beating dough. Perhaps it’s done in a back room or I’m not there at the right time, but I doubt it.
Well yeah; I meant grocery stores as a generic entity, not any one chain or location.
Distilled water from poop is just water. I’m not seeing any issue.
Walmart does this, too. It’s even mentioned in the article linked in the OP. Bananas and avocados are probably the biggest produce donations (at least in my area) because most consumers prefer to buy these items underripe. As soon as they reach the not-rock-hard stage, they are sent out to Second Harvest/Feeding America, which distributes them to local food pantries throughout the area. The produce that gets thrown away (composted, really) in my area is stuff that you cannot sell for health reasons, like moldy strawberries and peaches with the skin ripped off in spots, not stuff that most people would gladly eat, as long as they don’t have to pay for it.