My fourth day began with more culling. As I pulled out tomatoes, potatoes and peppers, I thought about how strange it all was. A fruit or vegetable can be 95 percent perfect, but that one bad spot dooms produce to the dumpster. 

I knew that the produce I’d culled was headed to the dumpster, but before this day I hadn’t actually thrown it away. Having to dispose of all that mostly good produce didn’t feel so great. When I was alone, I began setting some stuff aside on the grass next to the dumpster in the hopes that someone might take it home. Upon returning to the dumpster, I’d often find that items had disappeared.

I watched yet another training video that warned of the “bacteria danger zone”–41 to 135 degrees F. It specifically mentioned cut melons as items that needed immediate refrigeration. After that, I made a point to get these into the refrigerated wall first when re-stocking, imagining them rotting from storeroom to shelves. 

On this day, I learned that produce makes up about 10 percent of a store’s sales. That figure was a bit higher than I’d imagined. I also found that shoppers were surprised to see me open two boxes of strawberries, cull the rotting fruit and combine them into one box. There seems to be an illusion that wrapped produce is untouched. Not so. In fact, sometimes we’d pull out the bad strawberries without adding new ones.

Finally, I had to laugh when I witnessed how management views its employees. Two supervisors entered the small office as I was watching a training a video. “Is that the new guy?” one asked, wondering if I was the new management trainee.

“No, that’s produce.”

Just don’t cull me.

The third day began at 7 a.m. with the familiar a.m. “pulling” of packaged produce. I tossed all items with sell-bay dates of that day or before. I threw away 13 one-pound bags of cole slaw, 10 one-pound bags of mixed fruit and 2 two-pound bags of iceberg lettuce. All told, I tossed 36 pounds of produce because of a conservative estimate stamped on its bag.

Unlike some supermarkets, my store didn’t have a discount produce shelf. It was either the sales floor or the trash. Since almost all of the fruit I “culled” was perfectly edible, I asked my co-worker, who I’ll call Miguel, if the store ever donated any of this produce to charities. He said that a local shelter picks up some culled produce a few times each week. Because I also volunteer to find food for a homeless shelter, I made a mental note to ask my manager about collecting food on the other days. 

“Culling” non-packaged produce is based on appearance, not date-driven. With the squash, my co-worker advised to “keep it looking fresh.” I was surprised by how fragile zucchini and summer squash were and how many needed to be thrown out. The ones that didn’t rupture after being dropped by customers and employees usually shriveled after a day on the shelf.  

Miguel, a friendly Salvadoran who’d worked at the store for 6 years, then showed me how to inspect fruit in clear plastic boxes. He taught me to combine two boxes of cherry tomatoes when both had some rotten ones. With an incredulous look, he told me that most employees would just toss both boxes.

Next, we checked the berries. Many of the raspberry and blackberry boxes had a few moldy berries, but we did not combine boxes. Maybe that would’ve been too messy. We threw away 14 boxes of raspberries and 4 of blackberries.

Around noon, the store manager had me watch another training video that instructed me to greet all customers within a twenty-foot radius. Polite, friendly and helpful–that was the goal. After that, I was ma’aming and siring customers left and right. By the end of my shift, though, I may have ma’ammed a sir. It’d been a long day.

Because the second day began in the afternoon, I missed the morning cull. Instead, I spent most of my time stocking the produce section for night shoppers. The store remained open until 11 p.m., so we tried to have everything mostly full when the last produce employee left at 7 or 8.

My boss Larry, who told me he has 32 years of experience in the biz, stressed the importance of having neat and brimming displays. The latter bit of shopping psychology interests me most–this idea that nobody wants to buy from the dregs. That’s why they restock for relatively few night shoppers. The produce would be better off in the store room, but the supermarket’s main focus is sales, not maximizing its products’ lifespan. 

It’s a tradeoff. They’re willing to toss a bunch of loose mushrooms that sat out overnight in hopes of selling more by having a full-looking display. It’s not necessarily wrong, just interesting. They know they won’t sell all of them, but figure they might lose a sale with a half-full bin.

Also, the store’s worst-case scenario would be missing a sale because an item isn’t on the shelf. Supermarkets avoid that at all costs by routinely overordering, and, thus, knowingly creating food waste.

In between restocking, I watched another training video on the computer, which included a video game-like interactive section. They’d show a picture of a pear or head of lettuce with some bad spots and ask, “Would you leave this on the shelf?” The answers were obvious and the lesson learned was simple: throw out anything with a bad spot, bruise or bump.

Finally, I learned that there isn’t much waste when it comes to the store uniform. That’s because they make you buy your own supermarket logo shirt (to be worn with khakis). On the plus side, I now have a souvenir from my time in produce. 

By the time I had finished throwing away the perfectly good pineapple, watermelon, lettuce, mushrooms, etc., I was told to report to the office for training. This consisted of watching the appropriately titled “Entry Level Produce Associate Training Video” on an old, dusty computer. In that engrossing work, I learned that “the rule of thumb when culling is to ask yourself if you would buy the product. If you wouldn’t buy it, then why would the customer?”

The video continued, “If you ever have a question about whether a product should be culled, remove it and discuss it with your manager.” Later, whenever I’d ask my manager, who I’ll call Larry here, he’d invariably say, “Toss it.”

Moving along in the cartoon-laden training, I learned why I’d been put right to use: All dated items were to be removed by 9 a.m. on the day of the sell-by date. The reason, it explained, was to “ensure we are offering the freshest quality produce to our customers so that they will shop with us again and again.”

You can’t argue with that logic–or can you? Sure, it makes sense, but I know that the clientele also enjoyed saving money. Whenever we would put out discounted bananas that were already ripe, they sold like hot cakes.

The training even featured a visual culling exercise. It pictured an apple and said “Would you cull this item?” After clicking yes or no, I had to pass the same test with a pear, tomato and lettuce. Of course, there were no consequences for answering incorrectly.

The manager occasionally poked his head in a few times to ask if I was done yet. I needed to fill the holes I’d created with that morning’s culling. After all, it looked bad to have empty slots in the cold case. Apparently not as bad as having an item there on its sell-by date.

They’d get to the orientation later, I was told, we had to “cull” all of the ”out-of-code” products. They got me an apron and pointed me to the wall-length cold case of packaged produce. Basically, I had to pull all packages with a sell-by date of that day. I’ve written before about the difference between sell-by dates and use-by dates. Items are often good up to a week past the former, but here I was yanking packages from the shelf at 8:10 on the morning of their sell-by date.

I culled cut mushrooms, stir fry mix (cut peppers and onions), veggie trays with dip (crudités), watermelon chunks, pineapple chunks, a mix of pineapple, watermelon and cantaloupe and more. Based on their container weights, I tossed 24 pounds of fresh cut, Del Monte fruit that first morning. In addition, a few of the veggie trays had an “enjoy-by” date of four days from that day, but it’s sell-by date meant they must be pulled!

Not surprisingly, most of the stuff that I culled was pre-cut and pre-washed. When items are cut up, they oxidize and go bad quicker than if they were whole. Now, they don’t go bad as quickly as their sell-by dates indicate; none of the packages I took off the shelves were things I wouldn’t eat. But that phenomenon of faster-aging items produce is behind the cautious sell-by dates. In this case, convenience causes waste.

While I worked on the pre-cut and wrapped produce, a co-worker culled the loose stuff. When he was finished, his tray looked like a restaurant buffet. We both finished at about the same time and headed back to the produce room, where my boss was washing some lettuce. I asked him what I should do with my cart full of culled product.

“It all just goes in the dumpster,” he said. 

To move past grocery stores’ rhetoric on the amount of food they throw away, I decided to get a first-hand look. I would work in a supermarket produce department.

In addition to learning just how much product is squandered, I wanted to understand why an industry with minute profit margins and advanced software systems still throws out tons of food each year.

Calling it “The Produce Project” makes it sound a bit more scientific or glamorous than it was. In reality, I was working an entry level job at a large chain. Even still, it was a bit of an adventure and I learned something new every day. Check back tomorrow, when I’ll start detailing my experiences.

But first, just a few quick notes on my methods. I’m writing in the past tense because I’m no longer in the employ of this supermarket that will remain nameless. In total, I worked there for about three months. While there, I didn’t approach work as a journalist digging dirt, but as a produce associate washing it from lettuce. I worked diligently–as my one-month review attested–observed plenty and jotted notes on break or after work. In between, I restocked a lot of bananas.