![]() ![]() Packers can integrate the sale of imperfect fruits and vegetables for use as ingredients, emphasizing that restaurants and foodservice serve to benefit through reduced expenses, saving millions of dollars in food purchasing costs by incorporating imperfect produce into their menus.ĭevelop and reassess waste management processesĪlong with finding creative ways to market products, produce businesses will need to increase visibility over their inventory to get started with monitoring waste. As more and more retailers adopt and normalize the sale of “ugly” produce, fewer amounts of perfectly edible food end up as waste. You can convince retailers, too, that it could be an opportunity for them to make money through increased sales. Using terms like “misshapen” vegetables and fruits, for example, can reference its physical form rather than suggesting that there’s something inherently wrong with them, warding away imagery of damaged, rotten, or moldy produce that would otherwise be dangerous or less than ideal for consumption. ![]() Consider how physically flawed produce can be marketed and sold to customers, thinking about things such as how they’re labeled and how discounts can incentivize customers to purchase them. One way is to develop a market for imperfect fruits and vegetables. There are several ways to fully optimize the country’s produce reserve and reduce waste. What can be done to save imperfect produce and reduce waste? On a consumer level, customers have been conditioned to view only brightly-colored, unmarked, and perfectly-shaped produce as tasty and edible.Īn unusual appearance in a fruit or vegetable’s exterior when it comes to shape, size, or color can deter people from purchasing them as they’re deemed inedible, when in reality, outer appearance has no impact on nutritional value or flavor.Īmerica’s food system has developed to demand perfection in exterior presentation, leaving millions of pounds of what’s perceived as “ugly” fruits and vegetables to go to waste.įood Dive talks about how 81% of consumers say that appearance plays a factor in their produce purchasing decisions, with physically flawed produce being seen as less nutritious and delicious. The success of the food system depends on whether or not the food is bought and actually consumed, but according to an article by Forbes, misshapen fruits and vegetables turned away by grocery retailers due to their appearance make up 40% of total food waste. If the early stages of the food production system aren’t the biggest contributors to food waste, where, then, does the problem lie? As it turns out, the majority of waste comes from consumers and retailers rejecting produce that appears “ugly” or “imperfect”. Where does the problem of waste due to imperfect produce occur? So where does the bent, oversized, misshapen, and lumpy produce that does make it through go to waste? Keep reading to learn more about where the issue of rejecting “ugly” vegetables and fruits comes from, and how Silo can help your produce business reduce waste. The good news: of the more than 10 million tons of produce per year that’s not sold from packinghouses and farms due to cosmetic imperfections, most of it is composted and recycled to enhance soil health. A ReFED report on reducing food waste reports that a large amount of produce never makes it to the shelf for cosmetic reasons. A big contributing factor to the amount of food that ends up never being consumed (and therefore being sent to landfills) is the rejection of imperfect produce. In the United States, food waste is a significant problem.
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