A war against produce wasteA war against produce waste

There is a dark cloud looming within the sunny produce merchandising sector.

While there was a volume sales increase of about 3.6% over the last year, merchandisers are cutting into such gains by wasting vast amounts of products, and that is having both financial and health ramifications.

Such factors as spoilage from not selling produce in a timely manner to shopper ignorance on how long products can stay fresh, and damage from weather-related incidents are contributing to product losses, said Nicolas Bertram, chief executive officer at Flashfood, a digital marketplace that connects consumers with retailers that provide discounts on the fruits and vegetables that operators might otherwise have discarded.

“Consumers have very high standards for everything in produce,” said Bertram, the former president of The Giant Co., a Carlisle, Pa.-based chain of more than 190 groceries in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. “You must have the perfect pineapple 12 months a year no matter where it comes from,” he said at the 2024 Organic Produce Summit in Monterey, Calif. “You cannot have an apple with a divot on it. The problems are not going to go away.”

Plants, crops, and entire regions also are susceptible to disease, which can cause further waste, Bertram said. “Predicting the seasonal yield is not always good and climate change is making the volatility worse. It can be very complicated,” he said.

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Bertram said Americans discard more than 30 million tons of produce annually. “Produce is too valuable to continue to waste as much as we do,” he said.

Keeping produce fresh can be difficult because of the complexities of products going from farm to stores, Bertram said, citing “the production, transportation, distribution, and policies by states, municipalities, and at the federal level.”

Contributing to the waste is unsold produce that results from a reluctance by many shoppers to purchase products they find intimidating because they do not recognize the items’ ingredients, he said. “Then it is ‘how do you cook it?’ ‘How do you prepare it?’ ‘What does it look like?’ ‘What parts do you eat?’ The industry must do a better job in answering such questions if we want people to buy and eat more selections.”

Making additional shoppers comfortable in purchasing produce could also lead to greater activity in the less-recognizable organic sector, Bertram said, noting that consumers are “explorative” by nature. “They like to do different things,” he said. “Organic will continue to move forward inside the penetration of the overall fruit and vegetable category.”

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