Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves.

Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no accounting for taste. But I don't think it's outlandish for someone to give you a bruised apple.

Broken bones in chicken aren't harmful--the traditional way of preparing jerk chicken involves chopping the chicken with a knife that just cleaves through the bones. Again, your preference here is valid, but it's your preference, not something that's objectively better.

And these are some of the less extreme examples--being involved in my local CSA, I've heard people complain about potatoes with dirt on them, and literally heard someone refuse to buy eggs because they farmer got them from her own chickens. A lot of people's preferences around food aren't just arbitrary, they're downright illogical.

Substitutions and expired food are obviously problematic--there's lots of room for delivery services to do better. But I am not convinced that the average person does a much better job selecting their food based on "quality".

> Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

Playing double-devil's advocate:

1) Most people have no problem buying ugly food. Much of the standardization of produce comes from packaging and packing requirements. Non-standard produce is still consumed in other forms: juice, frozen, soup, etc.

2) The vast majority of food waste comes from unsold restaurant food and food that goes uneaten at home (goes bad before you can consume it). This has nothing to do with ugly food.

3) The bruised part on apples tastes like crap. It's mealy and sour and fermenting and off-flavored. It's not my responsibility to eat bruised apples because a store can't be careful in handling. Blame the supply chain and grocery staff, not consumers.

I've always had an issue with the "people should buy ugly food" argument. It strikes me as being somewhat elitist, and I have my doubts that the people making this argument actually follow through themselves and pick the ugly food at the supermarket, or really know if actually makes any difference.

I feel like I am doing the right thing by buying fruit and vegetables instead of processed food. Do I now need to make further consideration and question the impact of my choices because I am ignoring the ugly apples? Humans developed a highly sophisticated discernment of fruit quality for a reason.

My local store sells 3Kg of potentially bruised apples for the price of 1Kg non-bruised.

I often buy the bruised ones and cut off the bruised parts before eating. But I make this choice because while I do see a lower value in bruised apples, I don't see the value lower by a factor of 3. I usually cut off just 10-20% of the apple.

If I paid full price for a bruised product I'm right to feel taken advantage of.

but that is a very different situation than paying the same price and getting bruised apples where you have to cut off 10-20%.

"bruised" is non-ugly uglified by (mis-) handling/transport/whatever.

Before that there are lots of "ugly" food that never make it to the shop, related previous thread and single point anecdata:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212680

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18214314

> I've always had an issue with the "people should buy ugly food" argument. It strikes me as being somewhat elitist, and I have my doubts that the people making this argument actually follow through themselves and pick the ugly food at the supermarket, or really know if actually makes any difference.

I wouldn't go so far as to say "people should buy ugly food"--I'm merely observing that there's nothing inherently better about pretty food. But if you want to take my comment as a personal attack on you, I can't stop ya.

I get my fruit and veggies mostly from a CSA, so your accusation of hypocrisy based on "having your doubts" doesn't land.

> Do I now need to make further consideration and question the impact of my choices because I am ignoring the ugly apples?

I don't think so. There's only so much micro-optimization an individual can do in their life, and the impact here is pretty low.

The impact of delivery services as a whole, however, is a lot higher.

> Humans developed a highly sophisticated discernment of fruit quality for a reason.

Really? And what reason is that?

Your entire post is basically, "I think this is wrong because if it were right I'd have to feel bad about my actions", when in fact nobody is trying to make you feel bad, and if they were, your logic would make no sense.

>Humans developed a highly sophisticated discernment of fruit quality for a reason.

Humans also developed a highly sophisticated way of absorbing ideas and images of their environment, some of which portray ideal fruits and vegetables as examples of what should be eaten, and anything outside that norm which was passed down by parents and through the media should not be eaten, or at least looked upon with suspicion.

> Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no accounting for taste. But I don't think it's outlandish for someone to give you a bruised apple.

If I'm making pie or apple sauce, I'll seek out bruised apples—and pay less for them. Paying normal prices for bruised apples? No thanks.

> Paying normal prices for bruised apples? No thanks.

And because arranging different pricing for all the foodstuffs that look less than perfect costs more than profit on these items, into the bin goes perfectly good food.

Arranging different pricing for foodstuff that looks less than perfect happens all the time. How do you think very low price grocery stores are able to sell produce way cheaper than fancy stores. They buy lower grades[1] of produce for people who are more price sensitive.

[1] For an example of how this type of quality separation happens, check out https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/apple-grades-stand...

Apple juice is made from bruised apples. They have to get damaged late enough in the supply chain to get put on a shelf at all.

I bet most bruises are actually caused by shoppers once on a shelf.

It seems like you are making an unstated assumption that food being thrown away is a bad thing.

I'm not convinced. Let's say a farmer wanted to reduce foodwaste. So they only sold perfect fruit that they knew would get bought. That would drive up the prices of those perfect fruit AND there would be less fruit for sale in total.

Therefore, some amount of food waste should be acceptable to ensure the best outcome for everyone.

I used to work in a tomato greenhouse. If a tomato had a spot? It doesn't go into the packaging for stores. It goes into the bin for Heinz.

> Let's say a farmer wanted to reduce foodwaste. So they only sold perfect fruit that they knew would get bought.

Selling only perfect fruit is literally foodwaste right there. Fruits don't grow all perfect. If most of the fruit you see in store looks flawless, that literally means that most of the fruit harvested was either sold to another company or thrown away.

>Selling only perfect fruit is literally foodwaste right there.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you haven't exactly explained why "food waste" is a bad thing. I've given a reason why it could be considered a good thing: it can reduce the cost and increase total food that is purchased.

For an absurd example, see the "Eat your vegetables, because there are children starving in China" argument. Just because it would be nice if every hungry person had food, doesn't mean that letting any food go to waste is necessarily immoral by itself.

I’m not even sure the person who randomly picks bruised fruit would on their own account eat bruised fruit—just that for someone else they might be less discerning...

You don't get any discount in this case though. You're still paying $2-3/lb for bruised apples that are like you said literally waste at that point and $2-5/lb for chicken that if you picked out yourself would be of higher quality.

Even if they did give you a price break for lower quality food. They'd still do things like give you a pineapple that will never ripen before it rots like we received last week.

in a competitive market (which US groceries mostly are) if the store has to "eat the cost" of bruised fruit, then the price will necessarily have to be higher on the fruit they sell.

Think of it this way, you have fruit at home to be shared by all the members of your family, it was fine when you bought it, but now some of it is bruised. So now you own a mix of fruit: what do you do, throw away the bruised fruit, or trim it, or give a loved one the good looking one and eat the bruised one yourself? Those costs (tossing or trimming or eating slightly lower quality) have to be borne by somebody, in this case the whole family or a member of the family.

You buy a car and you buy insurance for it; that's because a car is expensive and you don't want to bear the burden of a bruised car yourself, you want to share that burden with all the other people who buy insurance; and yet, the insurance company is making money, so apparently you are paying a little extra for this decrease in the variance of quality.

Same with your theory of purchasing fruit: you are not saying (in your original comment) what you think you are saying, that bruised fruit is too expensive; what you are actually saying is that you prefer to overpay for expensive fruit all the time and not deal with imperfections. Because otherwise, if the supermarket could sell all their fruit and not just perfect fruit, and was competing against other supermarkets, then the fruit would be overall actually cheaper across the board; you say "you don't get any discount", but with time you actually would.

I explain all this because it allows you to live your life feeling less miffed.

Makes sense in economics 101. The reality is, the Instacart guy doesn't give a shit and will provide bruising as part of the service of schlepping your crap for you. The in-store shoppers don't really care either.

The explanation that you're providing is really a rationalization for paying more to procure an inferior product. You're always going to have wastage of perishable items. It's much cheaper and sensical to avoid moldy strawberries, close to date meat and dairy, etc by shopping yourself, or hiring your own casual labor without some intermediary subtracting value.

All of these services are hiding costs through VC largesse and exploitation. You can literally get more for less by just hiring a housekeeper and having them pick up stuff for you, but nobody does that because the costs are "above the line", and it feels less nouveau riche and more clean to have some service exploit the poor sap picking your banannas rather than talk to a human.

I think it's more that hiring a housekeeper is an option that most users of these services haven't given serious consideration. They don't know how it works or where they would start.

> The explanation that you're providing is really a rationalization for paying more to procure an inferior product

the explanation I gave is literally for paying less, so you missed the point of it, and you are then blaming econ 101 for your lack of understanding. And you are mixing in other factors that econ 101 covers, but the point of econ 101 is to learn to separate different factors.

The Instacart guy isn't a magic elf. The $0.05 you save on rotten fruit is offset by a $0.50 in labor.

As investors tire of setting money on fire, that will become more apparent, just as it did with Uber as prices went up and quality went down.

What you're missing out on is information asymmetry.

If you're insuring against a risk, and you have more information than the insurer, you may be profiting and the insurer may be running a loss.

If you're picking out your own groceries, you can select the pristine fruit and vegetables, and the grocery store takes the loss. With a disinterested picker, you take a portion of the loss.

You take a disproportionate portion of the loss, because in person shoppers are taking the pristine fruit, leaving more non-pristine fruit for the pickers.

Yes, you are correct that you are essentially paying a premium, but the issue is less about the item's cost and more about the need for time investment and physical presence--correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like it's possible to get the same level of un-bruisedness from delivery or curbside pickup that you could from going into the store and picking fruit yourself.

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?

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Just had grocery curbside pickup last week, including two pineapples. Both looked much greener than any I would have selected myself. (I normally select a pineapple where the inner leaves come out easily.) A bit of research online, pineapples don’t ripen once picked. Cut them up, and they were both fantastic.

What I'm saying is that your perception of quality is not actually objective quality.

This car has dents but those don't matter. Full price for you. Car still gets you from a to b just fine. This jacket has some holes and few stains but it will still keep you warm.

I know this isn't the point you're making, but the right dent patterns can increase fuel efficiency and make cars more desirable to some buyers.

Ok, now I need to know about these dent connoisseurs who measure their impact on fuel efficiency.

Effectively, there is no difference between an apple and one with a bruise. I still get the same nutrition and taste, most other differences being unimportant.

A jacket with a hole has massive loss of effectiveness, and I don't receive a new jacket to wear each day.

A car with a dent has significant loss of value, not that it's something I'm terribly concerned with, I run all cars until they die.

>Effectively, there is no difference between an apple and one with a bruise. I still get the same nutrition and taste, most other differences being unimportant.

That's simply not true. The bruises become rot spots and before getting there they introduce oxidation which affects taste. The shelf life is then also diminished not only for the bruised apple, but for any that are nearby.

Relatively speaking, I think the bruise on an apple is actually a measurably greater decrease in (relative) value than the dents in a car.

You could compare it to rust instead.

I can understand that for a crooked carrot, but for example a tomato with broken skin actually gets bad pretty quickly.

Neither is yours. But if yours is satisfied with the food you can get by ordering online, you're free to order online.

It doesn't sound like they are claiming that their perceptions are objective.

In your previous post, you trip all over yourself acknowledging that their preferences are valid.

It's obvious enough that's what they are driving at; they want a shopping service that accounts for their preferences.

If the vast majority of shoppers perceive a product as lower quality it is, almost by definition, worth less in a market. Quality is a very tricky idea to pin down (read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance if you'd like to hear a lot on the idea) and claiming that your own highly biased opinion on the matter is what counts as "objective" is a pretty bold claim.

This is true in some cases, but not most.

They should price the produce according to its quality then.

They already do to a certain extent. Damaged goods often find their way into the "reduced" section.

Perhaps this was the “actual price” of the produce anyway, including the wasted and donated food. Delivery means there’s more reliable metrics about the average quality of food stocked and expected by shoppers (in a given area). This is a good thing if they make it so customers can easily post reviews and request refunds.

That's a great marketing gimmick that some companies have made, but it's largely false.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...

I am highly skeptical. The author of that article makes a lot of claims, but doesn't really go into a lot of how the information was obtained.

I'm not denying there's some marketing involved here--I'm sure there is.

But there's also some element of truth here. I've worked at a food co-op and they definitely composted a lot of food. In the article's logic, that's not food waste, but I think that feeding people is still a lot better.

That article is an interview with an expert in the field. You can look up Sarah Taber and find more information and citations. Just because there's not a Works Cited list attached to a Vox interview doesn't mean it's just made up.

You realize that crops have to have organic material to grow, right? Using leftovers, spoilage, and damaged produce from the previous crop is how agriculture is traditionally done. If farmers don't use composting, then they have to buy some other source of organic material and fertilizer to grow the next year's crops. You say "feeding people is better", but there's more than enough food for everyone. The answer to hunger is not to force farmers to give the leftover produce to poor folks. Rather, it's to give the poor folks the means with which to buy the food they need. There's plenty to be bought! So much that lots of it gets thrown out! It'd be much healthier for the entire system if we addressed the problem at the source and made use of the systems that are in place rather than trying to short-circuit things, resulting in a lot of unintended side-effects.

> Just because there's not a Works Cited list attached to a Vox interview doesn't mean it's just made up.

For all I know it is just made up. Maybe if media companies got in a better habit of providing citations they'd be more trustworthy.

> If farmers don't use composting, then they have to buy some other source of organic material and fertilizer to grow the next year's crops.

Which, from what I've seen first-hand growing up in the rural Central Valley (and what I continue to see first-hand in other rural areas) is exactly what's happening. Those crops ain't being composted with any sort of regularity (I'm sure some of it might be, since store-bought compost has to come from somewhere, but I'm highly skeptical of the idea that the farms themselves are doing it).

The nugget of truth in the article is that they ain't getting "thrown away", either. Rather, they're typically getting sold to companies using them for raw ingredients on a more industrial scale (think canneries and baked-goods factories and TV dinner makers and such) and/or (more recently) companies that specifically market "ugly produce", and whatever's left over from that often ends up being animal food (whether through manufacture - e.g. dog/cat food - or fed directly to e.g. livestock).

I think it makes sense to be a lot more skeptical of the claims of companies like Imperfect Foods who have a vested interest in getting people to buy unappealing produce (from them, of course) than an independent food scientist staking her personal reputation on these claims.

Thank you, I remember reading this as a tweet but couldn’t find it (twitter search is.... lacking)

when you mentioned a tweet i had a feeling it would be by dr sarah taber, and she was indeed quoted in the vox post. i highly recommend following her on twitter; i have learnt a startling amount about food production and the realities of farming in america.

There's a fundamental question that the article doesn't seem to answer: if "ugly produce" is a myth, then where are these companies getting their ugly produce, and how are they able to sell it at a discount?

I'm fully prepared to accept "it's a marketing gimmick and they're selling at a loss" as the actual answer here, but it seems to go unasked and therefore unanswered.

They aren't selling at a discount, which is why it astounds me anyone pays for it!

https://slickdeals.net/article/buying-guide/imperfect-produc...

> But when a crop is complete, farmers plow everything back into the soil. Some of it ends up as organic matter that is supporting soil health, and that is okay, too.

Basically declaring that the waste is not waste. Solving problems by changing definitions.

If a field is harvested too efficiently it needs to be left fallow to rebuild lost nutrients. Leaving some in the ground is not waste by any definition.

Well... You do need to account for the lost inputs, e.g. fertilizer that runs off instead of being sequestered, water pumped in for irrigation, gasoline to power a tractor, and so forth.

A cover crop (e.g. clover) specifically for building soil that grows without aid of fertilizer or irrigation is a better story in this regard.

No, pointing out that what some people call waste is not actually being wasted, it is serving a useful purpose. "Waste" means it is serving no useful purpose at all.

It's fairly difficult to do something that serves no conceivable purpose. I could buy stuff and throw it straight into the trash and we could say it's not waste as I'm supporting manufacturing and the garbage industry.

If you care about limiting some wasteful practice, you have to pick some definition of what counts as waste.

It's it essentially composting? How is that waste?

If I buy a tomato, and throw it in my garden, eating none of it, most people would say I wasted the tomato.

There are far cheaper methods of fertilizing my garden than tossing food into it, which makes it "wasteful".

At a certain point you have to pick a definition of what counts as food waste, and stick with it. Fiddling with the definition isn't going to make the world a better place.

Plowing it back into the fields means less fertilizer is needed for future crops. How is that waste?

That's like a perpetual motion machine. Energy is wasted, there is no way around it.

The sun is a great source of free energy.

But not necessarily nutrients/fertilizers and most tractors and transportation today run on ICEs. So it's still not a free lunch.

It needed that fertilizer to grow to even be plowed back in to start. It's just a waste of space for a "good product". It's basically a free pass for next year. No money gained means no profits means profits loss.

If the produce is lost, it's tax deductible

If the produce goes back to soil, it's an expense and next time it will result in higher output.

It's not just a case of buying 'ugly food' or bruised apples. When I order online, I get potatoes that are sprouting, onions that have gone soft, meat with excessive fat or skin, and goods that are close to their expiry date. I get that, these are sold in order to avoid waste, but it should be my choice to pick them up. When I'm ordering online, I don't want to pay for poisonous potatoes or milk that will go bad in 2 days.

This is odd. In the Netherlands I get the oposite. Most of the stuff in the physical store is always closer to expiration than when I order it from the same store. This is because they stock the delivery cars directly from the warehouse. Which is always fresher than what they have in front.

Several of the US delivery services are just people shopping in your behalf and driving the food to you in their own car. For example Instacart works this way.

We had to experiment a bit to find out which store doesn't stock too much bad produce. After we found that out (the answer was Costco) this problem went away.

Same in sweden.

And I mean it's a bit of a meme about Millenials, but I pick out avocados based on when I plan on using them. Making guac tonight? I'm grabbing the softest-not-going-bad avocados I can. Making guac for friends (back when having friends over was a thing)? Firm is great, they'll be ripe just in time for Saturday.

> Bruised apples are perfectly edible. Maybe you just don't like them, and that's fine--there's no accounting for taste.

I find that once an apple gets a small bruise, it typically grows larger very quickly. If you eat it immediately, you can just cut out a small part. But if the grocery delivery comes with 50% of the apples bruised, that means you’re having to cut out (waste) a fair amount of your apples.

Specifically to bruised apples, the bruising may suggest crisp vs softness and factor into quality of the product. If I go looking for crisp apples, I avoid anything with a bruise as they often feel soft anyway and aren't worth checking. They are still edible, just not what I prefer or choose. I get that is a luxury of sorts, but I'd pick other fruit before a soft apple unless it is for baking.

Notwithstanding the baby carrots example, most ugly produced is still used and sold. It’s made into soups, salsas, juices, etc.

I’ve read that one reason we get so many e-coli infections from lettuce is that there is no secondary market (no lettuce juice) so the farmers drive it to the livestock farms and track back germs to the lettuce farm on their wheels.

The shavings from baby carrot production are still used, for juice and pulp.

For the benefit of any other perplexed non-Americans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_carrot#%22Baby-cut%22_car...

They are certainly not limited to America. You can buy them in many countries - they're common in the stores here in Norway, for example.

The 'cut' type? I've never heard of them in the UK - chantenay or other small but whole carrots sure, but not 'regularly' sized carrots trimmed down to a smaller 'carrot shape'.

Lol you don't have baby carrots, they are my fav, ready to just eat like chips. They just started selling carrot chips :O

Thank you, I really was confused!

> Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food. It's literally less wasteful to shave off most of a carrot so that it's a baby carrot, than to try to sell the same carrots as-is. There's nothing wrong with the ugly carrots--but they'll rot on the shelves.

that's a fair point, but it's not hard to come up with a counterexample where the produce is meaningfully different. I usually buy limes for their juice, and if I get a lime that produces less than 1oz of juice, that means I have to cut another one open and juice it. not only is this annoying, since limes are priced by quantity at my grocery store, but it means that I'm probably going to waste most of the second lime (or use cellophane to wrap up the second half, creating plastic waste).

I don't care too much about the aesthetic appeal of limes, but I'm definitely going to pick them all up to select the heaviest ones. these usually yield just a bit more than 1oz of juice, perfect for most of my use cases.

> Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food

It's said to be 31% of the retail and consumer food in the US[1]. While that is enormous, I don't think it necessarily should be considered unacceptable. The food supply chain is a system we want to have a lot of slack in.

So what level of food utilization would we have to have for someone to deliberately buy a very bruised apple at full price? I don't know, but I'm guessing it's too high to prevent a food security issue in a crisis.

[1] - https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/food-loss-and-waste

> an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

This isn’t true at all. It’s literally a myth made up by people who want to sell ugly food to consumers. Ugly produce is used as animal food, sold to food service companies where it’s ugliness wont matter after they prepare it, or occasionally tilled back into the soil as fertilizer.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...

When I first started going to Whole Foods back in the day, the produce looked like a picture out of a catalog. I’d never seen such flawless produce in my life.

Not even. If the produce made it to the store shelves then it is by it's definition not ugly. They should see the amount of produce that isn't sold at markets because it doesn't meet supermarket chain standards for appearance. We used to fill up the back of a pickup truck, in the late 80s and early 90s, with reject carrots for $10 from a local farmer. They were perfectly fine. We'd always keep a bunch for ourselves, of course, but the bulk of these carrots were used as bait traps. That still goes on today anywhere that carrots are grown.

> Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

Price them down, ppl would consider the deal. It's a market, isn't it?

Or, well, it's a supermarket being part of super-chains... Potatoes by pound priced like fruits.

There's at least one company trying to do this - Misfit Markets sells boxes of ugly produce delivered to your door, and they claim to be cheaper than supermarket prices as an ugliness discount. (Disclaimer: I've never used them, a relative works for them)

My wife bought into one of these services, the $25 box we received contained about 10 - 15 dollars worth of produce from my local store but at a lower quality. It was also random and often contained undesirable items in large quantities (who needs 12 lemons for the week?, What am I supposed to do with 3 fingerling potatoes?). I used to work in food service and it was pretty obvious to me that they were sourcing items from Sysco or US Foods by the way the items were tagged and packaged. I think the shipping costs eat away any value you could expect from something like this.

The 25 vs 15 dollars issue means their business sucks unless they have a value add on top?

If you were getting 15 lemons per week, maybe contract the vendor and try to address the issue?

> The 25 vs 15 dollars issue means their business sucks unless they have a value add on top?

As I am buying "less desirable produce" (from what I can tell it all came from normal cases that a restaurant would order, I think this fools some people as they aren't used to seeing produce that still has dirt on it and is less presentable like that) I would expect more of it for my money, not less. I understand they have to pay for shipping but it's not as if I don't have to go to the grocery store anyway, maybe I just don't see the value proposition, for us it just wasn't there.

>If you were getting 15 lemons per week, maybe contract the vendor and try to address the issue?

Even if the product was more evenly distributed it wasn't enough for it to provide value for me. That point was just the final nail in the coffin.

On the other-other hand, Instacart et al are all shopping in stores that already have this filter. So you're getting the expense, questionable selection, and all the waste.

I love my local CSA box, dirty root veggies and all. I know that our CSA has seen a huge business increase (to the point that they had to refuse new customers for a while) so I hope this change persists.

Bruised apples cannot be stored as long, so I try to avoid them.

Bruised fruit goes bad much faster than none bruised fruit.

> Bruised apples are perfectly edible.

And you have to eat them fast, because they get bad more quickly compared to non-bruised apple. And that is big difference, between apple that I can eat next two weeks and one I can not.

Not really. Here's one article that says otherwise (there are a lot more): https://thecounter.org/weve-heard-staggering-statistics-food..., but ultimately the crux of it is that there are things like applesauce and canned diced tomatoes out there. Companies can pay less for ugly produce to make those products where looks don't matter, so they do that. The market works well in this case.

> an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

Citation needed.

I don't believe this is actually true. The food industry is much smarter than you think.

"Around 25 per cent of edible fresh produce is thrown away due to visual imperfection or cosmetic damage every year in Australia. According to a 2013 study from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO),"

https://www.ausfoodnews.com.au/2014/12/10/woolworths-launche...

Original source is somewhere in there - sorry for the laziness.

Even without the citation I believe this and take it at face value. I'm not sure what would make you not believe it? Have you never passed over something based purely on looks or noticed someone else do the same? My kids instinctively do this when they eat fruit; even my 2 year old does it and they've never been told to!

What makes me not believe it is that I read the study you're indirectly quoting[1]. I can't see how the articles you & the sibling comment could be written by a journalist with any other agenda than to deliberately misinform.

The 25% number is not 25% of food produced, but 25% of the waste in the supply chain being on the consumer side. Nowhere that I can see in the 2013 study cited does the FAO make the claim that "fresh produce is thrown away due to visual imperfection", that number also encompasses e.g. people overbuying produce that goes bad etc.

By the criteria of the article you're citing if the production & distribution part of the supply chain got more efficient that scary 25% number would rise. Indeed if you read the study this is what's happened in industrialized countries, we have a higher food waste percentage on the consumer side because we have more relative savings in the rest of the supply chain.

1. http://www.fao.org/3/i3347e/i3347e.pdf

I have an anecdote too - I used to work for SAP and lead their FMCG practice in EMEA. We did many ERP projects for large grocery chains and we could see that a lot of their material waste was down to damaged good and expired goods. Two of the largest chains had a field in the their system to track items that had expired due to being left to rot on the shelves, the amount of fruit and veg that expired was large and it was mostly oddly shaped veg. We introduced a business process where the suppliers could only send produce that met a certain 'grade', this radically changed the amount of wastage on the store side but increased the wastage on the supply side.

Programmes like 'the odd bunch' where produce that looks funny is sold cheaper has gone some way to addressing the issue for certain grocery chains.

I don't believe there are any public studies on individual store wastage over this issue.

Wow. I know that folks prefer better looking produce, but I hadn't realized it was quite that dramatic.

France had aan ugly fruit campaign because of this:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-2693000/Forg...

>I don't think it's outlandish for someone to give you a bruised apple And apparently grocery stores put people with opinions like yours in charge of packing produce boxes, which leads to lost sales. Nobody's arguing that they're inedible, but how much of a discount is the retailer prepared to offer me for accepting his low grade produce?

> Playing devil's advocate: an enormous amount of food waste is caused by people simply refusing to buy ugly food.

In London there's a startup which sells such rejected, ugly fruit and veg: https://www.oddbox.co.uk/ (no affiliation beyond being a happy customer)

Considering their stated purpose, the fruit and veg in their marketing are remarkably photogenic

It's not just ugly fruits/veg, it's food that would otherwise be discarded for any reason.

I've only been receiving their boxes for a few weeks now, and gotten some strange J-shaped cucumbers, but most of the produce looks normal.

My understanding is the ugly food is often times used to make packaged foods like pre-chopped fruits and veggies, salads, apple sauce, baby carrots.

That’s a myth. Most ugly produce is sold to food processors:

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/26/18240399/food-waste-...

> it's your preference, not something that's objectively better

well, is that not a valid reason to want to pick out produce myself? How do I know the store working will have the same preference as me? What if I prefer my fruit to be under-ripe, and the store worker thinks I prefer over-ripe fruti?

One could argue that those preferences make the world a worst place. If we just accepted the first carrot we see rather than overlooking the crooked ones, there would be less waste.

We are so picky and so fussy that extra waste and energy is expended just to make fussy people happy.

I like to get what I want too but I can't help think that if we were all a little more relaxed in this area that the world might be a better place.

There is more to picking produce than just cosmetics. I don't care if my carrot is crooked. I care a lot if my banana is too ripe, or my apple is bruised.

Also, is blemished food wasted because people refuse to eat it, or would food be wasted regardless, and the wasted food is blemished because people select the unblemished food first?

Even though automated grading of produce is not unheard of, it's not represented properly in the market.

I think the first company to offer automated (or just standardized manual) grading and pricing on produce could be a big winner; I know I'd use it. It'd be especially good if the process distinguishes produce that's just ugly, from produce that is flavour/texture- or nutrition-compromised; eventually the latter could become well-defined enough that it goes straight to the compost heap rather than waiting with the produce that will actually sell at some price.

The first one that comes to mind for me is brussels sprouts: there is a huge variety in flavour/texture, nutrition, and beauty, and sometimes I really care about what they look like, often I do not, but also often there is a big difference in other qualities.

Just sell ugly food cheaper and people will start to buy it. In fact I wonder if there is not a huge market for someone who would say "No need to choose anymore: with 'ugly foods', you can save money and the planet"

Check out Imperfect Foods (I am not affiliated; simply a happy customer) - they send you a box with "imperfect" food that otherwise would have gone to waste.

There are also other similar companies doing this.

There are other things I consider when shopping, too, that pickers don't.

I try to pick fruits and vegetables at various levels of ripeness, so that I can have ripe produce throughout the week at home.

I don't want only green bananas or only super ripe ones; I need some ripe ones for today, and then some greener ones for later in the week.

> heard someone refuse to buy eggs because they farmer got them from her own chickens

OK, I'll bite- where else could a farmer get [chicken] eggs from besides their own chickens?

From an egg factory or an egg tree. :)

I think OP meant, that there are people that need a certain level of reality distortion to consider a thing to be proper. If it came out of a chicken just recently it's disgusting, but packaged and sorted with a stamp is how it should be for those people. Basically a silly brain fart, that goes with a civilization, where thanks to a proper label we can divorce ourselves from animalistic and disgusting bounds of reality.

My branded grocery store bundles up old veggies and sells them at a steep discount, they're really good for freezing, smoothies, or cooking same day.

In general I agree here. In case of bruised apples I am a bit picky because of patulin. It is a toxic produced in rotting apples.

I'll buy them. At half the price. Otherwise they can turn them to juice or stewed apples or whatever.

one bad apple spoils the bunch

Even if quality is there, how ripe do you want? Are you going to use those avocados tonight, or later in the week? Do you like green bananas or ones that are turning brown?

Let alone the "what looks good today?" or "what's on sale today?" method of shopping!

Even packaged goods are tough. When I'm in a store, I know quickly which product I want. I may not remember the brand name, but I can scan the shelf and find it.

Online, I have to sort through a myriad of options, not to mention sizes and variants.

BBQ sauce, for instance, returns 58 results on Peapod. Sweet Baby Ray's, which I like, is 22 of those. There are 13 different variants (original, hickory & brown sugar, honey, buffalo sauce, sweet'n spicy, honey mustard, honey teriyaki, sweet teriyaki, sweet vidalia onion, maple, sweet chili glaze, honey chipotle, no sugar added) and 7 different sizes (14oz, 16oz, 18oz, 18.5oz, 28oz, 40oz, 80oz).

Holy crap!

I know what the label looks like, and I know the bottle is about yea-big. The images online are 200x200... I can barely SEE the label.

Then, what if what I want isn't in stock? Is it going to appear on the page? Am I just not going to get it? Would I get a substitute, as I might if I was in the store?

By the time I do that mental exercise for 50 items, I might as well drive to the store.

These are hard challenges.

One thing that might make a difference is integration with club cards. Giant knows what I buy down to frequency and UPC. Why haven't they done better integration to link my in-person buying with encouraging me to buy the same items online?

For me, the wish is for scripting. Most of my buying is algorithmic, but the filters don't match my algorithms.

It is difficult to express, "Please give me the cereal that I like the most that is under $X/lb. If there is an exceptional deal, buy more." without an API or scripting.

This is like writing a cost function for a global optimization algorithm for a problem with tons of parameters. You will very soon find out that the optimizer is much more adept at finding highly rated, but extremely useless outliers than you are at writing a competent cost function.

Herein lies the path to coming home to a cart filled with very-cheap-cause-it-expires-tomorrow produce and no tooth paste because it didn't make the cut under some top dollars limit you introduced to fix another optimization loophole.

I mean, this sounds like every other day at the store for me.

Which, if you break it down further:

1. Everyone's "algorithm" is different. Even if you could bake every possible filter into your eGrocery product, can you imagine the UX nightmare?

2. The "that I like the most" is a tough thing to quantify. Who is "I"? Me? My wife? My kids? My mom who's coming to visit this weekend? What do I like? Specific brands? Things I've bought before? From that store, or a different one? Things I might like because they share characteristics?

That's why user-scripting makes sense!

The downside, for the vendor, is that I'd also wind up scripting price-searching at multiple local grocery stores for equivalent items. If I can just curbside pick up what I need at both stores, they're literally next-door to each other.

The irony is that if those two stores were to cooperate and work together on a unified scripting system, both would gain sales on average; yeah, if an ear of corn is 50¢ at Safeway and 75¢ at Raley's, Raley's would lose that sale, but if Raley's happens to also sell mayonnaise for $1 v. Safeway's $1.50, and I can order both at the same time to fruitlessly attempt to satiate my insatiable hunger for elotes, then both would get a sale (and same deal if one or the other is cheaper on the chili powder and/or cotija).

We used to have such an API in the UK with Tesco, but that looks to have withered: https://www.tescolabs.com/category/api/

I’ve noticed Wegman’s has recently been separating fruit by “ripe today” and “ripe in a few days” and it’s really great. Especially for things like peaches and avocados that seem to have a pretty limited window between hard as a rock and rotten.

Wow, that does sound great! Are they doing that in store only (like separate bins?), online, or both?

They’re in separate bins at my local store and each bin has a sign. Since I know which fruits they separate out like that I just specify when I order online. They even put a little sticker on the “ripe today” produce if you order a mix so you know which to eat first.

"Let alone the "what looks good today?" or "what's on sale today?" method of shopping!"

That one is really important with fresh food. Maybe the lettuce looks good or the cucumbers, who knows?

This could solved with a little more thought from those doing the pick and pack.

If someone orders 3kg of bananas or a dozen avos - mix it up with some ripe now and some on the green/firm side.

The biggest issue we had was out of stock items. If you're in the store and a key ingredient is out you decide on a replacement meal which just isn't possible online, as there was no guarantee that what you ordered would still be available when they got through to your delivery.

Because they instead decided to invest their tech money into autonomous floor cleaning robots, if the Giant stores near Harrisburg are any indication.

All those things, plus:

1) concern that prices online are higher so the delivery option's more expensive than it looks (food delivery services do this),

2) concern that some or all sale prices won't be used online—a lot of my shopping past my immediate needs consists of checking the canned and frozen sections for any actually good sales.

This is why I’ve backed away from it. I don’t mind paying for delivery, but the fact that I oy both a direct few and a variable extra markup per item, and that markup seems to vary so much per item makes it hard to swallow for me. It just feels like scummy enough that I’ll go to the store.

Give me an option where the cost of convenience is obvious and straightforward and I’d come back.

Delivery fee + Tip also. Best option is probably pick up as you save some time without getting charged other fees or needing to to tip anyone.

This is why I avoid online for fresh food, instead getting them to do the heavy lifting items and resilient commodities (eg they can't mess up a bag of flour, bottles of wine, beer, Coke etc; if they're damaged too badly they'll obviously be unable to supply them).

Deselecting the substitution acceptable option is also wise. This was a major obvious flaw even back in 1999 when Shatner was pushing Priceline - obviously they'd have an incentive to pretend they had to substitute a certain percentage of the premium brand stuff for cheaper items and do it sparingly enough that they made more profit whilst trying not to lose you as a customer. My experience in the UK is that Ocado always tries to substitute items with a worse cost to weigh ratio - it's particularly silly because they think I won't notice (feels like they should detect that I'm focused and dial it back!)

Seems like a bold prediction that most (maybe any?) grocery stores have the level of corporate organization or even level of education to even consider a "secret order substitution to prole cart-pushers who will then have to answer customer service calls asking why their order was amended to add a more expensive item".

Someone down the line has to actually act out the 'evil algorithm', and will then have to actually interact with the aggrieved customers. In a third party delivery service I imagine it would be trivially easy to get the line workers to betray the customer / rest of the organization, but there are also none of the incentives to, for example, try to dump low velocity items through deliberate substitution errors.

Maybe we have different experiences but you talk as if substitutions are not a regular part of the process - I'm not a massive delivery shopper but in the pre-Covid era it was almost unheard of to get a delivery without at least one item substituted when you forget to deselect substitution. I switch amongst three of the major chains and the experience is basically the same.

Also I don't think your approach need be how it's enacted. You could quite easily run a set of adjustments against the restocking priories to see which had the least negative effect on profits and that would likely result in this kind of substitution the way it's observed. This wouldn't even need one to put on a "let's do evil hat", couched in these terms it comes across as perfectly reasonable.

Substitutions are omnipresent in my experience, but I view that as a symptom of almost all stores having really profoundly bad inventory tracking (do the developers for the web platform even know whether they have any items on the shelf at all?) so even with ordinary infrastructure hiccups I'd expect there to never be completely filled orders.

I don't know too much about the way the restocking priorities are established, but it appears to be totally ad hoc and at the behest of the shift worker on the line at the moment your order us started from what I've seen. The stores would need to have inventory systems fine grained enough to know that there are high margin items in stock to be swapped in to implement this kind of malicious action plan, but I think most stores (that aren't Walmart) don't even have their inventory spatially mapped at all, let alone multiple times per day to actively dump target items.

Our local store, QFC in Seattle, has been doing a great job of selecting produce for our curbside delivery. Quality has matched or beaten what I normally select myself.

I don't know where they're finding such huge broccoli crowns, but they're consistently doing so (we're ordering per crown, and paying per-pound, so the incentives are aligned there).

On substitutions -- they require customer review of every substitution.

(We take the errors in stride -- a global pandemic is a time that we can be glad to have such reliable high-quality food at all. The best fail was the day that Anjou pears got substituted in for garlic, but somebody found the garlic, so we got garlic too :).)

Your local QFC is really a Kroger btw

Maybe technically in terms of ownership, but the QFC brand stands from Kroger IMO. I've never felt such joy in a grocery store.

As a person who used to work in produce in the US, just wanted to say the visual image of a produce clerk dumping a box of apples to the display is ungodly.

Where are you shopping? A few discount stores might do that, but there's no way any prominent stores do that. I mean, first of all, virtually all brands of apples don't just come loose in boxes, they are layered with cardboard trays. So you couldn't just dump them all out at once even if you wanted too. Unless you want to have cardboard trays flying everywhere. That's just not a simple or quick way to unload even if you are being careless!

Yep. This has been our experience as well. Not only do the pickers have no incentive to do a good job (and often aren't even trained in how to judge the produce and meat they are selecting); and not only do mind-boggling substitutions take place sometimes; but in just about every online grocery order we've made in the past two months (so about 10 times by this point), we've gotten some items that were just plain wrongly chosen--ie we asked for one thing and got something entirely different that might have been nearby in the store, and was rung up as what we ordered, but we didn't actually get the item we ordered.

Lots of these problems could be improved through better technology (there's a running joke on Twitter about accidentally ordering a single banana or fifty avocados, and it's amazing how truly bad the grocery websites are at representing what it is you're even ordering) and by optimizing the product selection for online ordering and delivery distribution (versus today where most grocery delivery seems to be done by store staff walking the store and building a cart by looking for the things on a print-out of the website order), but what grocery company is going to invest in those sorts of fundamental changes when the CW is that we'll be past this pandemic within a year or two at most?

Oh yeah. We tried the Costco delivery thing once, but discovered that the "substitutions allowed" option is basically "fuck my shit up Fam".

We've been doing curbside pick up for groceries for the past few months and fresh food and produce are definitely the biggest problem with the substitutions being the second. The substitutions would probably be better/less often in more normal times, but the fresh food selection problem is always going to be there. For now we do it because our health is more important than our fruit quality, but we won't continue it when things achieve some level of normalcy again.

I used Kroger's clicklist when it first started, and it was find but got worse. It wouldn't have been so bad if I got the occasional piece of produce or meat I would normally give a pass too, but as time when on, it started to seem like they were actively starting to dump their worst meats and produce on clicklist shoppers.

I also found myself having to go inside the store almost every time to go get the items that were allegedly unavailable. In the end if I'm going to go inside anyway I might as well not pay the extra fee and not get the worst the meat and produce departments have to offer.

I'm super picky about my apples after growing up near an awesome apple orchard. I only buy a few types unless making a pie or similar. Each type has certain features I look at. I like eating crisp Fuji apples the most and usually only buy those based on coloring, shape, and the sound it makes when I pop it into my hand like one might a baseball into a baseball glove. The sound is critical to finding a crisp vs soft apple. No way I'm leaving fresh produce/meat selection to a random staffer, especially not apples.

I always check use-by and best before dates. When milk can have a date that's over a week away, I really hate it when someone buys milk that's use by tomorrow. Same for for bread, cheese, eggs, butter, fruit and veg, any number of items. Supermarkets naturally want to sell you the soon to expire stuff so how can you trust their pickers? The answer might be buyers and deliverers independent from the shops.

A lot of the use-by dates are more like quality suggestions or even outright marketing (how could salt go bad?!)

https://www.nytimes.com/article/expiration-dates-coronavirus...

You're right but, illogical or not, given a choice I'll always take the fresher one.

I don't know how standardized layout is within a chain, but at my local Walmart superstore the area immediately to the right of the entrance closest to the grocery section is produce, baked goods, and deli. Just past that is the meat section.

Immediately to the left of that entrance is check out, starting with a bunch of self-checkout stations.

This makes it quite reasonable to do a quick extraction mission for produce and meat that has you in the store for only a few minutes, with good avoidance of other people. The interior of that section is just short low aisles that you can easily see over, and square tables of baked goods, so even if there are a few other people there it is usually easy to keep track of them and arrange to have an obstacle between you and them.

My current approach is to get most of my groceries by their free contactless pickup service, and get produce and meat via in-store quick raids. If while on a produce raid I see that there aren't many people shopping and they are doing a good job with masks and distancing I might expand the mission to grab other things while I'm there.

Generally speaking, I find that at most supermarkets dairy, eggs and meat is at the back, because they are intentionally designed to make you walk through other things to try and squeeze in more purchases when things catch your eye. And this was true when I've lived in the NE and in the PNW.

Yeah, pretty much every Walmart here in Reno is the same way, except sometimes they'll be flipped around (i.e. grocery area to the left instead of the right). Similar deal with Costco and Sam's.

I agree, I've actually found that Walmart has been the best online grocery experience. My local supermarket is Ok but HyVee has been wildly inconsistent.

You also can't substitute one brand of salsa for another. That'll start fights in some circles.

Recent substitutions I've seen (where I specified "no substitutions"):

Ice cream flavors: my favorite for something I'd never pick (still ate it, annoyed)

Margarine instead of butter -- the heck? Won't use it.

Vanilla yogurt in place of plain yogurt. Slowly eating it for breakfast, annoyed; can't use it in savory dishes which is what it's for.

Juices: I can't stand sugar alcohols, and got a ton of crap full of sucralose. Won't touch the stuff...

Not to mention the half-rotten veggies that I'd never select for myself / won't survive a few days in the fridge.

> I can't stand sugar alcohols, and got a ton of crap full of sucralose

I don't think Sucralose is a sugar alchohol. You can spot those because they end with "ol" - Mannitol, Sorbitol etc. I find it pallatable myself.

Something I've noticed recently is they are getting quite fast and loose with the "natural flavoring" terminology. At first, I thought that something with Sucralose was considered to be naturally flavored because sweetener isn't a flavoring according to some legal definition. But then I saw something with artificial flavor listed in the ingredients, so my revised hypothesis is it must be legal now to say something contains natural flavoring even when it also contains artificial flavoring. If your reaction is "this is technically correct", my objection is that it's vacuous, since everything technically contains natural flavoring.

One of my points here is also that I don't blame the order picker if they got something with Sucralose by accident.

Sucralose is lab made, but stevia is not, so there’s that.

And is lab made vanilla or mint considered natural flavoring?

I've speculated that vanillin is the "artificial flavoring" on many ingredient lists, but I never see it specified explicitly.

Hot sauce: asked for Sriracha, was told it was out of stock. Asked for store brand sriracha as the replacement, got Franks.

It's fine on eggs I suppose.

I'm obviously just one data point, but my Instacart experience was pretty mediocre. Because of how the substitutions work (and there's no live inventory), you pretty much have to be alert and ready to context switch into "grocery substitution" mode the whole time the shopper is picking your food. I don't remember what the fee was, but in the end it wasn't "I absolutely prefer to go to the store myself!" but rather "That was a painful enough experience that next time I'll just go do it myself"

Not justifying it, but try dewatering the yogurt and see if that does anything for your savory dishes. I don't think I have the right gauge of strainer and end up using leftover coffee filters.

Dewatering won't take out the nasty vanilla flavor or the added 12 g of sugar. Moreover, some flavored types of yogurt contain cornstarch to add body, rather than the milk content one would like from a milk product. Plain yogurt truly is a different beast that American sugar-yogurt.

True enough, but at least in my shopping cart, the brands that have plain yogurt also have vanilla yogurt that.

When I think ‘American “yogurt”’ I think Dannon or Yoplait, and I can’t recall the last time I saw plain yogurt from them. Google tells me Dannon has plain yogurt in pint containers, but I’ve just never seen them on the West coast. It’s Nancy’s, Stonyfield, etc here. And the problem with those is because they have a small shelf presence, the vanilla and plain yogurt are invariably next to each other. I have brought the wrong thing home several times, and now double check. But I’ve been doing that since before Greek yogurt was a thing here (and only recently discovered the dewatering trick for making Indian food, which I only make a few times a year anyway) so I’ve not had the need to experiment.

I will note as an aside, neither Dannon nor Yoplait are strictly American companies. I don’t think “we” should get the blame for fucking up yogurt, when French and Spanish citizens were, at the very least, accessories to the murder. Thank you very much.

It's the sugar and vanilla flavoring that I find offensive -- are you suggesting that both would be addressed by dewatering? I can imagine it taking care of the sugar (with several washings, I suppose?) since it's water soluble, but I think that the vanilla would be irredeemably dissolved into the milkfat.

Alas, I've gone back to shopping due to these experiences, so I've got a tub of the good stuff already. So on one hand this is all academic, but you've caught my academic curiosity :)

My theory being that drained yogurt has a sharper flavor, it may or may not mask the unwelcome flavors.

I had to double-check. The carb content of the 'water' you drive off (whey) is pretty high. I couldn't say one way or the other how much of the added sugar comes out with the whey, but I suspect a taste test will tell you. If you're stuck at home anyway it's worth a go.

It's good to have an arsenal of substitutions for dishes.

For what it's worth, "hung" vanilla yogurt makes absolutely revolting chicken tikka.

Good to know. Patak’s has an impressive distribution chain out here and I like that it’s shelf stable so I tend to keep one jar of something (usually the tikka) around just in case I get a yearning and we already have rice.

I made some with hung soy yogurt recently, it was ok. Cumin and coriander can cover some tastes but I guess vanilla ain’t one of them.

Dewatering is not going to remove the flavor and sugar in vanilla yogurt.

i think you're right. It's certainly my opinion that I don't want a USA store clerk picking my produce. On the other hand here in Japan most produce is much more cared for, probably to the detriment of the environment but still, far less bruised or bad produce.

And yet, AFAIK, it's the same in Japan. People don't seem to want to order their groceries.

Which makes me wonder if there aren't other reasons. One is that there's no good way to deliver. You have to be home to receive. They can't put your milk, butter, yogurt, ice cream some locker.

You have to be home to receive, at least for people the commute to work, means it pretty much has to come between 6pm and 10pm. How many grocery delivery services can handle that?

--

On the other hand, my mom says she's driving to the grocery store and everyone is doing pickup. The groceries are already chosen and packed up, you just drive up your car and the load the bag. So if that's true then people are willing to let others choose the produce.

I'm inclined to agree. I think you're up against some deeply rooted human behaviors of wanting to sift through and gather/select their food. Those behaviors rapidly scale based on hunger... but frankly, no one in the income bracket that can afford to buy their food online ever gets really hungry in today's world.

Not to mention expiry dates on products. A store is happy to give out a 12 pack of KD that expires tomorrow. Shopping myself I know it will take a couple months to finish and won't by something about to expire. I also won't pick defective packages. Both of these things happened ordering from Amazon before this crisis and I have not tried them since, or likely ever again.

About substitutions, I'm guessing they haven't explored what all they can do with that and there are probably some easy wins still available.

Right now it seems to be pretty capricious and up to the whims of someone who is in a hurry and whose primary responsibility is pulling things from shelves.

They could use software to make educated guesses. Random ideas:

(1a) Allow customers to rate substitutions after the fact as bad, OK, or good. Then learn which substitutions customers generally like, and try to do those. The goal should probably be to avoid bad substitutions, so 10% bad / 60% OK / 30% good is preferable to 25% bad / 25% OK / 50% good.

(1b) If I myself rated a substitution as bad in the past and you need to substitute for that same item again, try something different.

(2) Look for safe choices in order history. If vanilla yogurt isn't available today, but blueberry and coconut are, and in the past I've bought cherry and blueberry yogurt several times but never coconut, then give me blueberry.

(3) Get fancier and try to model features of products that a customer does and doesn't like. You've got metadata like keywords from product names, ingredient lists, brands, packaging type, and size. I bought this ice cream, those bagels, that coffee creamer, and that applesauce, and cinnamon is the common thread in all four. So when you're out of brown sugar oatmeal, give me cinnamon spice even though I've never bought that before because it looks like I like cinnamon.

(4) Model based on similarity to other buyers. I often buy these 5 items, and someone else also buys those same 5 items, but they often buy a 6th one that I don't. So maybe I'd like that 6th product too as a substitute (provided it's already on the short list of reasonable substitutes).

I think substitutions are way, way more complex than that. Just from my own experience:

I eat low carb (keto). Recently I had vanilla yogurt (22g carbs) substituted for Greek yogurt (5g carbs), which I basically can't eat. There's a handful of other things where the carbs can vary wildly between brands such as sausages, salad dressing, and BBQ sauce. Not to mention that many people think the "low fat" version of anything is basically interchangeable (reality: less fat, but 10x the carbs (sugar) to make up for it).

My kid is allergic to peanuts. There's a shocking amount of things that "may contain peanuts or tree nuts" including things you wouldn't necessarily expect like pita breads, meatballs and chicken fingers. We stick to the same brands generally, but always read the label whenever buying something new.

Food allergies are probably possible to handle (though you really do have to check everything), but I don't realistically expect the pickers to follow the more specific/crazy diet restrictions. We've only done online pickup a handful of times but have stopped allowing substitutions on most things for the above reasons.

Maybe they can just give the customer more direct control. It wouldn't require anything complicated: simply allow me to select any substitutes I would be happy to accept. (Make this optional, and leave the current system as the default.)

If they want to make it easier, they can give me the list of items they would consider as substitutes, and allow me to add/remove items. And they can remember the choices I've made in the past.

Instacart nominally does this, and then the shopper went ahead and gave me bad substitutions anyway. I mentioned in another comment here that you're getting real-time notifications about substitutes while they're shopping (there's no real-time inventory available, so they discover an out-of-stock item when they go to grab it). If you don't answer their substitution question quickly enough, they'll just make a decision (skip, pick the sub you asked for, pick a random similar item).

Doing home grocery delivery by hiring people to shop at the grocery store for you is like doing e-commerce by hiring people to go to the mall for you. Grocery stores are deliberately designed in the exact opposite way that fulfillment centers are; even “warehouse stores” like Costco are adapted to exploit consumer psychology rather than optimize picking throughput.

I have never had substitution problems with Amazon Fresh because “substitute one ASIN for another” is an absurd use case if you can reliably track your inventory and allow people to choose products based on availability. I’ve also been pleased with meat and produce quality; maybe I’m lucky, or maybe grocers have been getting away with stocking shoddy produce for years on the expectation that the customer can do the QC work for them.

They substituted veggie soup cubes with chicken ones.

I am a vegetarian. :/

> Now you have to consider the automatic substitution of equivalent items when something is out of stock. My dibetic friend was telling yesterday that they substituted regular mt dew for his order of mt dew zero sugar.

Typically you have the option to indicate that you do not want any substitutions.

They don't always respect this. I've had multiple Instacart shoppers replace items without marking them as replacements, including replacing some of them with things I explicitly indicated I did not want as replacements.

A company I do contract work for banned Instacart from one of their local stores entirely due to customer complaints to store management about unapproved substitutions.

I'm curious what metrics are driving that behavior by Instacart shoppers. In my (entirely amateur/armchair) opinion, it would seem like the time you'd save by making an unapproved substitution wouldn't make up for the potential for negative reviews, which could get you driven off the platform entirely.

Maybe a majority of customers don't care enough about unapproved substitutions to review poorly? Though reading through this thread suggests otherwise. Maybe there's some other internal metrics which shoppers or Instacart have access to that incentivize poor substitutions in the name of speed?

Honest questions - I don't know anything about this business and it's interesting to me that it appears to be such a pervasive issue.

Purely out of curiosity, how do the store police this? (I'm not very familiar with how Instacart operates, but I thought it was just a person going to the store as a normal shopper in your stead.)

I’m pretty sure the shoppers pay with a special card. They probably just tell the employees at the check out counter to refuse service to anyone with an Instacart branded credit card.

Wait, why complain to the store?

In Canada at least, the Real Canadian Superstore chain has set up InstaCart as their "official grocery delivery" partner. When you go to the Superstore website and click "Shop Delivery", you go through an InstaCart flow.

Although I suspect complaining to either the store itself or to InstaCart is going to be relatively futile, it seems that having the store managers bubble their complaints upward to regional managers may be more effective than complaining directly to InstaCart. Corporate makes decisions like that partnership, and if all of the store managers in a region are making the same complaint to HQ, maybe something might change. Maybe.

Exactly. Online grocery ordering still has a significant problem: accurately delivering on a customer's wishes.

It's a complicated problem. Customers have various "squishy" preferences - your bruised apples may be fine to me. Customers also have dietary restrictions that they just can't have. In-store inventory (esp fresh items) is constantly changing and may not be up to date. Items can easily look similar but are actually different in grabbing the wrong item or substituting.

When you go to the store, you can get exactly what you want. Until that problem is solved, grocery delivery will always be a minority.

This this this. In our area you cannot get good pickers.

I am sure they are tired or bored or something... but it is most of the time not worth the hassle. So I get it... but it is not a good experience at all.

Tired, bored, or perhaps the reality is that the business model simply wouldn't work if the wages paid to Instacart shoppers were high enough that they could reliably get labor who cared. As-is it feels like a desperation gig and the results match.

My wife and I use Shipt and we always get a guy named Matthew. If we order apples, Matthew takes the time to find the good apples. If he doesn't like the apples he will text my wife and ask if we want to nix the apples in our order. Matthew always gets a very generous tip and I think there is an opportunity for a service to take a white glove approach to grocery shopping that busy people will pay a premium for.

Additionally, there have been times when perishables like non pasteurized juice, and milk have gone bad when I had them delivered. I realized that I do a good job of picking those items last during a trip to the store, and I drive home immediately afterwards, while the picker/delivery person is probably not incentivized to do the same.

I agree that choosing in-person is better, but I find the experience good enough while keeping out of harm's way of the pandemic. A bruised apple is not going to ruin my day.

Most delivery services I've used have a "don't substitute" option as well if you need that for sensitive items.

I would hope that grocery stores become warehouses and the only people allowed in are delivery.

You could redesign the entire stores to optimize for this which could reduce the likeliness of damaged goods.

Amazon would be in a good position to do this (the Whole Foods near me already has part of it set aside for something like this).

This would be sort of funny, since many operated like this in the (not recent) past. Customers picking their own products off open shelves was an innovation at one point (and it was greeted by some people with similar disdain as our current self-checkout lines).

Where online shopping reaches sufficient scale, that happens:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_store

Amazon Fresh works this way already.

This was a point of price differentiation at some of the online grocery retailers I used while living in London. Some folks will be willing to pay more for “perfect” produce — even for bananas as an example there’s a need for a slider of green to yellow that is really relevant.

Oh the automatic substitution non organic to organic is not much of an issue. But I have had food items like oatmeal auto replace with ice or a sponge. I don't know what is worse honestly the fact ai is so bad or that a real person will buy the insane replacement.

People are complicated though, even for seemingly safe issues like swapping non-organic for organic. I never make that substitution myself, except for the few times a year I'm shopping for somebody else who would make that substitution.

As a consumer I don't enjoy paying higher prices for lower quality produce with an extra helping of e. coli, and it's frustrating to see disinformation campaigns demonizing GMOs while ignoring "organic" mutagenesis or trying to masquerade organic farms as being pesticide-free just because they use undisclosed/unregulated amounts of "natural" chemicals which repel/kill pests rather than regulated amounts of chemicals which are definitively classified as pesticides.

> Now you have to consider the automatic substitution of equivalent items when something is out of stock

or, as my local store handles it, simply not getting an item that is out of stock that I would be ok with a substitution.

My wife doesn't even like the produce I pick when I get produce and meats so it's unlikely some store person or contractor from a delivery service app will do the same.

This brings up another question in my mind.

You are examining 10 apples, well, so is everyone else. So all that fresh fruit has been held, bare handed, by the person who picked it, the person who loaded it and x number of customers who've examined it.

Not that ordering fruit online eliminates that problem but it seems like it would be a little more hygienic. One picker, one loader/examiner.

Maybe we need a better way to see germs so we know when we are done removing germs.

The solution is to simply wash your produce.

I'm not sure how the examination can be done at a later time than picking. Either you want to pick it or you don't. And different people have different standards.

The picker should just always choose the best available. Running low on selection is what naturally forces suboptimal picks.

It depends on what you want too.

For eating as a snack, I want small-to-medium sized apples. For cooking, I'd rather have a few giant ones so the peeling is easier.

I eat bruised apples. Who cares?