All Carrots are not the same. Courtesy Science Daily
Almost every supermarket now carries neat little bags of bent bananas, angular avocados and contorted carrots. Sold as ugly produce, they are a significant change from perfect fruit in every aisle. But are they really helping cut down food waste? Or just another profit channel? By James Teo.
Sydney, March 2022. A year or so ago, Australian supermarket chain Coles launched a marketing campaign to start selling 'ugly' fruit and vegetables at a discount. The sell was two-fold: it will be cheaper, plus it will help farmers sell fruit and veg that were ugly, and previously rejected by major buyers – and customers.
But some campaigners are smelling a rat. The bent food packs, they say, are not rescuing produce that would otherwise be left to rot in the fields and orchards. The new line is cutting in to stocks of produce that would otherwise be used in soup, sent to food banks or donated to poor social groups, they say.
“Most "ugly" produce gets turned into soups, sauces, salsa, jam, ice cream, and so on,” asserts Dr. Sarah Taber, a crop and food safety scientist from the University of Florida. “You think that stuff gets made from the pretty fruit and veg? Just think about that for a minute…”
“You should not feel obligated to buy ugly fruit” - Dr Sarah Taber.
The real problem, says Taber, is not looks, but that almost all producers overproduce their crops – not that they are ugly. She says that at most commercial farms, produce is sorted and selected in the packing house, and only the absolute rotten or horrible is really thrown away. “Produce gets graded by size, prettiness, and (sometimes) flavour/eating quality. Know what happens to most of the produce that's edible, has enough shape to survive in transit, but looks funny? It goes to stores that poor people shop at,” she says.
So packing it up and selling it in big supermarkets as “Ugly Fruit or Veg” is actually taking away a valuable source of supply for less well-off sectors of society. “You've got to have a debilitating level of ignorance to assume that if Paycheck Supermarket doesn't stock ugly fruit, it must be getting "wasted," she argues.
Other commentators likewise agree that Ugly Fruit packs don’t solve a problem – they simply monetise it. “There is this compelling argument that ugly-produce companies helps farmers. It does not,” says Emily Atkin in The New Republic. Also, she says, it doesn’t address the key environmental argument that large supermarkets are incentivising large-scale agribusiness to continue overproducing.
She quotes an article in The New Food Economy that describes Ugly Fruit sales as reflecting “a very troubling trend ... that commodifies and gentrifies food waste.” This trend, it argues, is not maximising the use of food that would otherwise go to waste, but is contributing to the business of food surplus.
“The stuff in these packs is not ending up in a landfill,” co-author Max Cadji says. “They’re just tapping into the same marketplace as the guys who make shredded carrots.” This means the Ugly Fruit marketers are actually competing with other players in the non-perfect market, meaning farmers are likely to overproduce to meet pure ugly demand.
Normal or not normal? Your choice … Courtesy Sheryl Kirby
“The reason we have so much waste in the first place is because of over-production,” said the report’s other author, Eric Holt-Gimenez. “This is a way to capitalise overproduction - and so (potentially) increase the flow of waste.”
Taber agrees. “Honestly, I think these (Ugly Fruit) companies just found a good hustle that makes them look good and makes money. There’s nothing morally wrong with that, but to say, “I’m saving the world and I’m fixing a food problem,” when there are actually better solutions is really disingenuous. It’s just a profit-oriented solution,” she asserts.
Indeed, resesearch has shown that Ugly Produce is a very good business model. In two research projects, over 1,000 responses to buyers of bunches of ‘ugly’carrots showed that they were likely to buy them if they came with sales messaging that mentioned sustainability benefits and the reduction of food waste.
According to Gemma Dittmar of the Truly Deeply consumer website, Ugly produce can help farmers shift up to a third more of its crops that would not previously be accepted by retail outlets. One manger noted that of the weekly 1000 tonnes of carrots it harvests, 10-30% did not end up being sold to retailers. In this case, the carrots would have been sent to a food processing company, sold for livestock feed, given away or simply dumped.
But in all cases, it could be argued the food was not wasted, but used in some other way even if simply ploughed back to fertilise the soil. “I want to be given the choice to stop food waste and support local farmers,” says Dittmar. “A lot needs to be done to change the market perceptions and create demand but we can’t go on ruling out 25% of fresh produce as unsuitable for supermarket shelves because it isn’t pretty.”
Taber agrees, but adds that we need to understand the reasons behind new kinds of marketing too if we are to become more sustainable, not just Ugly-Lovers.
“You should not feel obligated to buy ugly fruit because someone told you it’s going to save the world. It’s not. It’s just supporting someone’s business model,” she says.