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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

I seriously wish I knew how to buy B grade food. Slightly misshapen tomatoes at a discounted price? Sign me up. I feel like I'm not the only one too.

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"Know what happens to most of the produce that's edible, has enough shape to survive in transit, but looks funny? IT GOES TO THE GROCERY STORES THAT POOR PEOPLE SHOP AT"

Read: ethnic markets, 99 ranch, h-mart etc

Other candidates are foodmaxx and grocery outlet.

I've been to all of those places and other than the decor and maybe freshness they didn't seem that misshapen or blemished to me.

H Mart is closer to Whole Foods than an ethnic market. Ugly produce most certainly is not ending up there.

Since when has h-mart been a "poor people market"... Their stuff can get pretty expensive near me and usually has been pretty good quality when it comes to produce. Though to be fair their quality has been going down hill these past two years.

99 ranch? Really?

My understanding is that they, like many Asian markets, have exclusive long term deals with certain farms. Maybe only for certain types of produce?

Regardless, I find a lot of their produce, especially their greens, to be incredibly fresh and incredibly good looking — much better than what I can typically find at TJs or WF.

Her examples really don’t have very ugly produce in my experience. Like, all the stuff at Grocery Outlet or the Dollar Tree looks pretty damn good, although it’s often not very fresh. The only time I see really misshapen or bruised fruit is at the farmer’s market in discount bins. Is my experience abnormal?

My experience with Grocery Outlet leads me to think that their produce is usually stuff that's close to expiring, rather than things that are blemished.

Agreed. I buy about half my groceries from Grocery Outlet and it's more likely you'll sell slimey lettuce in bags nearing expiration, or nonperishable products that have been phased out, but from the same brands as "regular" stores. The fresh produce isn't even that much cheaper than say, a Kroger store and the quality is comparable.

It doesn't though. A load of it just gets ploughed back into the ground.

Just speculating here without any knowledge. But this question made me think. So let's say food industry has lots of "ugly" (whatever that means) fruits that are not sold directly but used in other products. And because of that they are sold much cheaper. Then along comes someone, and notices that:

"hey theres a huge amount of fruits that are being sold very cheap. Is there a way i could sell then for more?"

So you start a spreading idea that ugly fruit get's waisted and this this is not eco friendly etc. And next thing you know someone on HN is asking "where do i get these ugly fruits" :)

And yes it can be sold cheaper than normal fruits, but if it's more profitable than turning them in to jam, then it's a win.

By the way, not saying that it's wrong, just an interesting way to manipulate people to not being picky and eat all the fruits.

Doesn't really make sense from the seller side. There isn't more profit in driving down price and demand for perfect looking produce. It would just smooth out the pricing and eliminate the premium for fancy looking produce

Farmers markets that have actual farmers selling produce they grow. It's primarily the supermarkets and corporatized/lazy markets that sell primarily pretty cardboard.

Also, grow your own.. anyone with at least a balcony and sunlight in California has no excuse to grow tomatoes and peppers in the summer.

Grocery Outlet sells hydroponic Live Lettuce for cheap, including the mixed varieties box, at least here.

I have some friends who planted (4) four tomato plants in a ~6'x6' planter in their backyard. Fast forward a few months and they're overrun with tomatoes. Salsa, pasta sauce, food dehydrator running constantly, foisting their bounty upon friends and lovers. I was severely impressed by their yield.

We've grown tomatoes every year for the past 10 years or so so this sounds very familiar. It's not difficult - to be honest all you do is stick them in the ground and leave them to it!

I should add that tomatoes freeze very well as long as you're using them for sauces, soups etc.

Quite a few supermarkets in the UK have started selling "Wonky Veg":

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/05/asda-put...

https://www.wonkyvegboxes.co.uk/subscribe/

Here in New Zealand the Chinese supermarkets seem to stock a lot of it. The prices are lower and the vegetables still taste fine, just look uglier.

A lot of it ends up in Fijian supermarkets.

It's sometimes a thing in Germany. At least there were articles about stores doing that a few years back. Haven't seen any of those (neither articles nor ugly-bins) in a while though.

I don't know if it's common in the USA, but it's common for markets in the weekends to sell seconds.

I've since moved cities, but I used to be able to get a week's worth of fruit and vegetables for under $10. Most items were under $2 per kg.

I think there are some services that do this, e.g. https://www.imperfectproduce.com

Subscribed to this for several months.

90%+ of what they shipped me was ordinary surplus produce. Even the "ugly" carrots they sent me were ... just ordinary carrots, as far as I could tell.

Sounds like you stopped using it, could you share why? I'm curious if their service was good.

I used it for several months and tracked the prices, and with delivery and the box fee it's about the same price as the grocery store except that you have limited choices and they tend to cycle between the same things. Most of the vegetables were legit normal looking, but a lot of the fruits were small.

The prices were about the same as my local grocery store -- in some cases higher. But I found a live cockroach in one of the boxes they shipped me and it freaked me out too much to continue.

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