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Comment by neekb | Hacker News Reader

The thing that bothers me most is.. Don't people want cookies any more??? When I go grocery shopping, I get a cookie from the bakery. I need to look at them all and pick out the best one. That's how it works! Although I'm sure Amazon will have a solution for that soon enough as well!

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To give a data point, I have never bought anything fresh from the bakery while grocery shopping unless it was part of the intended shopping list for that day.

to add another data point: if I want a fresh baked good, I'll get it from a dedicated bakery or bake it myself

The thing that bothers you the most about this is people not wanting cookies?

it's representative of a whole class of impulse or semi-impulse buys of fresh-made custom items in a store.

Amazon has already been using machine learning to separate fresh vs. moldy strawberries; I'm sure AI will be able to identify the freshest cookies better than humans in the near future.

If you're talking about ordering online they won't give you the most fresh items. They'll give you the ones which are still sell-able as fresh ie. almost moldy. Once those are gone, they'll give you the next one in line, but not the most fresh as you might pick yourself if you were in a physical store. Because those will still be sell-able tomorrow or the day after, but these which are almost bad aren't.

What this means is that when you buy an item which almost nobody buys fresh, like say apricots or coconuts (the case here, YMMV) and its easily perishable then you may end up with food which you gotta consume very soon once you receive it. If you buy an item in high demand with a high turnover rating you're probably good to go though.

Fresh is overrated anyway. Get a large freezer. I got all my bread in freezer, all bought on sale (50% discount). We generally toast it, but having it out of the freezer overnight also works. Same with frozen fruit (berries esp) and some frozen veggies. It doesn't deteriorate either, and stays quite tasty (better than canned, generally). And its cheap!

I’m having difficulty finding any reference online to them using machine learning to sort fruit. It also seems odd they would given they are a distributor/retailer and not a grower/wholesaler.

Got a link to share?

I haven't heard this before but it makes a lot of sense to me. If you're requesting fresh food to be delivered, you want it to show up fresh.

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