Unless you’re shopping at your local farmers’ market or growing your food yourself, most of the produce you’re buying come from a far-away industrial farm. Technology has evolved significantly to allow fruits and vegetables to travel across the county (or even the world) to get to your supermarket.
Strawberries are specifically bred to withstand transit. Meticulous climate controls allow your food to be perfectly ripe when it reaches the shelves. Agricultural science has never been this advanced—but that doesn’t mean quality controls can’t still fall through the cracks.
There are a lot of steps from the time your produce is harvested to when it ends up in your shopping cart. And because of this, there are some unsavory secrets that make your food seem a lot less appetizing. We asked our readers who had experience working with produce purveyors to reveal all of the juicy details. Here are 10 things you should know before you embark on your next shopping trip.
1. Produce isn’t washed before it hits shelves
Theresa, a former Wal-Mart employee from Glen Burnie, MD, saw the produce arrive at the store on large pallets in trucks and hit the shelves without ever being washed. “I’ve seen it come in completely bad. I would never stop washing my produce,” she says. Even if the store you frequent gets its fruits and veggies from a reputable vendor, can you be sure that the products haven’t been contaminated in transit? As one Reddit user pointed out, “If you assume it’s clean when you pick it up then you’re assuming that everything went exactly as planned at every point in the process from tree to store.”
2. The most accessible food is usually the least fresh
Melanie, a chef from Manchester, NH, explained the proper rotation procedure that produce managers should be using: The first batch of produce that goes on store shelves should be the first batch that’s discarded to ensure freshness. In an effort to sell the older produce before it goes to waste, employees place the fresh stuff at the bottom of the stack and rotate the about-to-perish food to the top. The lesson? You might have to dig deep to find the best buys.
3. The average supermarket apple is over a year old
No matter where they are in the stack, you shouldn’t count on apples being fresh from the orchard. The fruits ripen during a very short period in the United States (between August and September), so keeping them in stores the rest of the year requires that the apples be treated with chemicals and kept in cold storage. In a warehouse setting, they often sit at least nine to 12 months before they end up in your cart.
4. Employees often don’t follow health policies
According to our reader, Melanie, supermarket staff should be wearing gloves and personal protective gear like a hair net or hat before handling ready-to-eat produce, though if you look around your local store, it’s clear that that often doesn’t happen.
5. Your fellow customers are also part of the problem
We’ve heard some pretty horrific accounts of customers spreading germs at the grocery store. From letting kids touch items, then put them back, to grown adults coughing or sneezing into their hand, then continuing to rummage through the produce, there are just too many factors out of your control that could lead to food contamination. “You simply cannot trust the fellow customer to make the right choices in what they are handling,” Melanie says.
6. The displays are designed to trick you
In an interview with Modern Farmer, the former regional produce director for A&P supermarkets reveals the tricky psychology behind product placement in grocery stores. The staff counts on customers being drawn to central displays with top sale items, so they place regularly priced items on the “wings” to spark other purchases that you may not have planned on to begin with. Sneaky.
7. There’s no such thing as “in season”
The same produce director also mentioned that stores aim to buy from producers that can supply year-round, so when it comes to chain stores, “in-season” items aren’t really stocked anymore. They won’t purchase locally grown produce that’s only available for a few months out of the year, so chances are that even during peak stone-fruit season, your peaches, plums and nectarines are still coming from South America.
8. Supermarkets seriously jack up produce prices
Tons of Reddit users have complained about the markup on fruits and veggies at local supermarkets, even though they’re plentiful in their hometowns. One user said, “I live in peach mecca [South Carolina]. Peaches from my town are sold at high-end grocery stores for $$$$. I can buy them in summer for $5 a bucket…I can go to my local market…and there will be idiots buying the exact same thing I can buy out of the back of a truck only two parking lots away.”
9. Rotten greens can make their way into the salad bar
In some stores, lettuce and other greens that are going bad in the produce department are sorted by employees and chopped up to sell at the in-store salad bar. Sure, there could be some salvageable parts, but if the greens are so wilted and mushy that they wouldn’t sell whole, do you really want to be eating them?
10. Some fruits and veggies are especially risky
Before filling up your shopping cart, check the Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” list of popular fruits and vegetables with high pesticide levels. Strawberries, apples, nectarines, peaches and celery are some of the worst culprits, and Chef Melanie also named melons as risky for food-borne illness due to their porous skin, which can hold tons of bacteria and germs. Make sure to scrub them well before eating!