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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

When I lived in Brooklyn, the standard at most fruit/veg vendors was to have the best stuff inside and the bruised stuff outside (e.g., at 40cents/lb discount.) We usually brought from the outside and did the math on whether the recoverable portion was worth the discount.

Unfortunately the supermarkets do not work this way -- they seem to have one class of goods. I'm not sure what happens to their bruised goods, but I do wonder if they offload those items to other stores? Does it really go straight into the trash?

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My parents used to run a produce market agency in Sydney. Their clients were banana farmers and their customers were national supermarket chains.

From what I remember, not much was ever wasted and trashed out of their warehouses. Any bananas that couldn't be sold in supermarkets due to quality or size issues, were sold to bakers and smaller market retailers, and anything left after that was sold as animal feed.

In Boston, there's an outdoor public market (Haymarket) that operates Friday/Saturday and basically sells dirt cheap produce (and some fish/other food).

The catch, is that it's whatever the wholesalers couldn't sell during the week to the supermarkets and now need to get rid of before next week's shipments come in. It often doesn't have much shelf life left and/or is ugly. And the vendors tend to keep cutting prices to the point of nearly giving away whatever's left towards the end of the day on Saturday. 10% of the normal price still beats throwing it in the dumpster and getting 0%.

It's a nice model that matches people wanting cheap food with the excess/castoffs in the market.

That's because there are classes of supermarket instead.

- Go to a cheap supermarket and expect bruised stuff and pick out the stuff you like.

- Go to a more expensive one and expect no bruising.

- Go to a yet more expensive one and expect nothing but organic and ripe.

It's kind of like class expectations. You don't want to be known as the person who shops at a place with bruised stuff (and the supermarket appeals to shoppers that way).

You find that in farmer's markets as well. Go to an inexpensive one and expect bruising. Go to an expensive one and be angry if there is any bruising.

I don't know if it's still the same, but when I was running the produce department at a Food Lion in the mid 90s we would just discount the damaged produce and only tossed stuff that was rotting. Bruised apples got wrapped 4 to a tray. I don't remember how much the discount was, it was programmed into the scale.

I believe supermarkets then sell it to the next group, which are restaurants or wholesale purchasers that send to factories. Highly unlikely that non-rotten food of supermarket quality is wasted.

Nah, if it goes to anybody, it goes to food banks (or other 501(c)(3) organizations). The supply chain bifurcates much further up; it'd take a lot of effort for a relatively low volume of unsaleable but unspoiled food at the store level to make it to a restaurant or a wholesaler.

I used to live 20 floors above a supermarket. I could see quite clearly when they'd bring in a large garbage container and dump hundreds of pounds of produce into it, pêle-mêle, and then it getting carted away.

I live in the US and 10 years ago ate almost entirely out of dumpsters. Grocery stores throw out perfectly good food every day. If you ask in front they'll say they donate it, but in back there's a dumpster full of cartons of eggs with one egg cracked, and packaged food that's a day past its sell-by date. We waste an absurd amount of food.

It's been about 12+ years since I've regularly dumpstered food, but my experience is that more food was being thrown out before (but maybe not much before) the sell-by date than after.

I think the issue is that of given the choice between something with a sell-by date a few days in the future or 10-15 days in the future at the same cost, nearly everyone is going to take the food with the better date. Which means the arrival of a new batch of inventory makes the older inventory barely salable.

Technical solutions could help here: it is taxing on humans and most POS systems to have to adjust the price of older inventory, but if that could be done automatically (or the labor pushed onto the customer to identify the condition in exchange for a discount) people looking for deals might help reduce this type of waste.

> Technical solutions could help here: it is taxing on humans and most POS systems to have to adjust the price of older inventory, but if that could be done automatically

That's a pretty good idea aid seems it could be solved entirely by software (+some signs for awareness).

I doubt you've got a good data stream about sell-by dates, tho - the old and new have the same UPC generally. Maybe OCR of sell by stickers? And this doesn't help things that don't have dates, like produce.

Dang, I figured that stuff would have been included in the barcode. There must be some way to track this automatically because I doubt stores are managing their inventory on tracking this manually in 2020.

Ever done store inventory? It's one of life's little joys.

I've heard of them but I figured it was a periodic thing to make sure the stores automatic accounting aligns with actual stock to adjust for stolen, damaged, or misplaced product. I didn't think it was for checking expectations.

You just need to include the expiration date in the barcode and apply discounts automatically.

A good grocery store will waste less. They'll have someone merge multiple cartons of eggs to refill ones that have one cracked (assuming the carton isn't soaked). They'll see they have a bunch of inventory about to go past sell-by and will toss up a sale to get rid of as much of the near-expiration items. They'll be careful about rotating stock so that the older items are up front so people who are less date-sensitive will buy them.

> They'll have someone merge multiple cartons of eggs to refill ones that have one cracked

That's technically illegal. Grocery stores are not allowed to repackage pre-packaged food. We have strict food-handling regulations in place to protect consumers, which is part of what makes food waste such an issue.

I worked in a supermarket about 10 years ago as a stocker, among other things. A lot of our expired products were donated to various places, but a not-insignificant amount was also thrown away or literally poured down the drains due to laws preventing it from being sold or given away (IIRC). Also this is the end of the chain, I don't know how they operate at a higher level of distribution.

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