After researching wasted food at grocery stores for some time, I felt I wasn’t getting the full picture. To move past food companies’ rhetoric and get a clear picture of the amount of food supermarkets throw away, I decided to get a first-hand look.
In September, 2006 I began working in the produce department at a large grocery chain. In addition to learning exactly what foods were tossed, I sought to understand why an industry with wafer-thin profit margins and advanced software systems still throws out tons of food each year. Follow the saga with these posts:
The Produce Project (intro) The Produce Project: Day 1–Packaged Waste
The Produce Project: Day 1–Training
The vegetables pictured here are the kind of produce the store “culls,” or throws 
away because of imperfections. As a culling guideline, I was told to toss a fruit or vegetable if I wouldn’t buy it as a shopper. Having one dark or soft spot meant it was trash. The same held if it was wrinkly or unusual looking. Uniformity and perfection were the ideals.
After reading about your first 4 days as the produce guy at a supermarket I was hoping you would talk about what you had to go through to get the culled produce to be donated to food shelters or soup kitchens. This is something that I am interested in getting involved in, but am curious about some of the excuses that I may run up against and if there are any regulations out there about the donated foods.
Thanks for creating such an informative site. I look forward to reading more about what you’ve done and what you’ve discovered and using it to decrease waste in a big way.
Wow, it’s amazing how much perfectly good food goes to waste. Hope you have an update.