When I go to the grocery store I almost always check to see where my food comes from. I want to know if my peaches are from California or South Carolina, if my carrots are from Idaho or Iowa, etc. But there are a bunch of products in the produce section that are under the Foodhold, USA umbrella that all say “distributed from Landover, MA” with no indication of where the food was grown, only where it was packaged and distributed. Their website gives no indication that they expect people might ever want to look at it, let alone use it to access useful information about their products.
Is there any way to find out where they buy their produce before they pack it up and ship it off to stores across the country?
Obviously, the sources of produce are going to vary from day to day and from product to product. I’d recommend asking the produce manager where a particular item is from.
Edited to add, Landover is in Maryland, not Massachusetts.
The OP’s question is much more general. A great many pre-packaged grocery products of many different brands give the city of the distributor but not where the product was, y’know, actually produced or grown.
So GFL finding out where your food is really coming from. If you’re worried that it might be Chinese produced, protein enhanced with melamine, flavor enhanced with anti-freeze, or simply containing more ground rat than you’d prefer — Yeah, GFL with that.
If the OP thinks the location on the package has *any *connection to where the stuff is grown or processed, then he/she is sadly mistaken. It’s simply the city where at least one middleman in the supply chain has at least one office.
This is really my concern. Beyond that, there are different US states that I am no longer comfortable buying produce from and I’d like to avoid that, so a product saying, “Grown in the U.S.A.” doesn’t offer much help either.
I guess this means I will be spending a lot more time at the local farmer’s markets and possibly putting in my own garden in the yard.
The question given in that webpage was overly broad, “Does this product - does any product sold by Giant - Ahold - Foodhold, USA LLC - contain any products which originate in the People’s Repubic of China?” Given the global sourcing of food and other products, of course the answer is going to be yes. But if they’d said that, the next question would have been, “Which products?” and that’s difficult to answer.
For example, perhaps that children’s toy in aisle eight was produced in China or some of the items in the Asian foods aisle were imported from China. Those might be the easy ones to identify. But perhaps that package of Healthy Choice frozen ginger chicken has a tiny amount of imported ginger or soy sauce. If there is a situation in which people who ate a particular product are getting ill, the manufacturer can trace the source of the ingredients based on the production code. But in general, you can’t identify the source of every ingredient in every packaged food item.
I ran into new information on packaging and country of origin a few years ago, too. I’ll have to dig around for the cite if you want it, I’m going from memory of what I looked up at the time. There was an organic frozen berry medley that was recalled for contamination (of what I don’t recall). Turned out one of the types of berries was traced back to Turkey and that was the source of the problem. Looking at the bag, it only had the US distributor listed and I was confused because I remembered something about country of origin was supposed to be listed.
The country of origin labeling, turns out, only applies to single-content packaging. So that bag/can/crate of just strawberries has to have the country it came from listed, but the container of strawberries, raspberries and blueberries does not. What I haven’t looked up is whether that single-content rule applies to multiple-source single-content packages. I’m betting that when those peeled baby carrots came from both Florida and Chile, only the distributor needs to be listed.
Some fresh produce that comes in pre-packaged bags (e.g., potatoes and oranges) will be branded by the small family farm where it was grown. These will commonly give the name of the family farm and the city (or region).
But read it carefully. Some of these “small family farms” also import produce and package that. So see if the package mentions anything like that.
What I also want to know: When a product says “Produce of China” or “Made in China”, does that always mean mainland China? Since “there is only one China, and Taiwan is part of China” (the famous Nixon-era “Shanghai Communiqué” formula), what are we supposed to understand about products so labeled?
Are products from “mainland China” always (or usually) labeled “China, PRC”?
Are products from Taiwan always (or usually) labeled “China, ROC”?
A lot of foods are seasonally sourced from different areas throughout the year. If you can find sweet corn in January, it probably comes from Florida. By September, it’s a late planting from Minnesota. If there’s a crop failure, a distributor may switch to a supplier in a different area.
Right now there’s an avian flu outbreak in the Midwest that’s drastically affecting egg supplies.The article mentions that Post, among other manufacturers, is buying eggs from the spot market, which means they may not be getting them from the same source on a day-to-day basis.
The oil field waste water that is being used for irrigation might be full of toxic contaminants. But how much of that actually gets absorbed into plants? The article only hints at that question and doesn’t say much about it. There is a lot of discussion there about testing the water more thoroughly for more contaminants, but nothing is said about doing more research about which contaminants end up in which kinds of plants.
That is true, but I personally would like to avoid CA produce while they figure that out. I think that should be my right as a consumer to know what is in the things I’m eating and drinking and if I want to avoid produce that is being watered with poisonous wastewater I think I should be able to do that. Our household also only eats animal products that are Certified Humane because we believe farm animals deserve to be treated decently even if their ulimate destination is our kitchen table. In either instance that is something we as consumers should be allowed to decide for ourselves and the food industry shouldn’t be allowed to hide contaminants or animal abuse behind a generic “distributed by” label.