Supermarket standards

Have you ever tried growing your own fruit?  If you have you will know that each piece of fruit has its own characteristics – yet they all taste delicious.
Supermarket retailers have stringent requirements in terms of how fruit and vegetables are to look when they are sent in from their suppliers. This puts a large amount of pressure on growers to develop crops which have certain, often unnatural characteristics. Look at this apple for example – there is hardly anything original or exciting about its carefully designed features (a bit boring really!) 

Retailers require fruit with a specific appearance and quality, still at a low price and this misleads customer understanding of how fruit grows, what it looks like and how much it costs to grow, pack and deliver to supermarket shelve. The perception that if fruit does not look a certain way it is not acceptable to buy or eat is simply not true.  Just because one apple is redder than another, one plum has more skin blemishes than another or a pear is slightly the wrong shape does not make the fruit inedible or to that fact unsellable. However the consumer has been educated to think that fruit should look a certain way and be a certain size so if growers do not meet these standards their fruit often doesn’t sell.

To try and keep to supermarket specifications fruit growers need to use more sprays on the crops and end up wasting a larger proportion of their crop as it does not meet these tight guidelines.  This is all costly to the growers and has put many of them out of business as they cannot continue to grow and sell their crops for such low prices versus the high expectations placed on the end product.

What happens to rejected fruit?

Most rejected fruit is used in processed products, though the grower will not earn as much for this fruit as they will for their fresh produce crop.  In other cases the fruit is used for animal feed, thrown away or simply left on the tree. Even cooking apples, which are peeled before use can be rejected for shape and skin blemish reasons by supermarkets.

Over the years the impact of supermarkets (along with other factors) has resulted in the loss of 60% of UK apple orchards and around 50% of pear since 1970.

So how can we help?
As consumers we can all do our bit to support UK fruit growers. Where possible always buy UK fruit - if you can, buy locally or even better direct from the growers then you know you are paying them a fair price. 
Don’t be put off by small abnormalities in your fruit – this doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with it – it is a fact of life that everything that grow naturally will have its own character.  And teach your children about how fruit grows so that they can follow in your footsteps and support our UK fruit orchards.