When to buy end-of-shelf-life produce

When it’s going cheap

When you wander around the fresh fruit and vegetables section of a supermarket, the temptation – if not your right – is to squeeze the produce on display before selecting what to put in your basket and take home for dinner. Smell, it, regard it and touch it (and then wash your hands). All to one end: to find out how fresh it is. Fresh produce carries no shelf-expiry date, so here, more than anywhere in a store, there applies the maxim: caveat emptor. What you pay for is what you get. So best is to know what you’re paying for.

Elsewhere in the store, for the uninitiated, produce is split into ambient, chilled and frozen. The last of these also has an expiry date, but it’s generally a safe time into the future. Ambient has an expiry date, when it is packaged (unlike fresh fruit and veg) and is everything sold at the temperature of the store – its ambienttemperature. Chilled is the most vulnerable of the three: its expiry date may be only a few days away and, because ordering is an exact science for stores, even with the aid of AI, it’s the category most-often ending up in dumpsters at the deliveries side of a supermarket.

Chilled goods are generally given an expiry date that is scientifically evidenced to be “over-adequate”, so that, even buying produce on the expiry date gives you a few days in which to safely consume the produce. Beyond the few days, the purchaser should consider binning it, at least giving it a deep intake of breath through the nose before cooking it up. However, beyond the expiry date, shops should remove the produce from the shelf, and not sell it.

In the past, the binned produce would simply be collected by refuse men and incinerated or land-filled. Occasionally, the homeless and destitute would “raid” such dumpsters, either knowing full well that the produce could be safely enjoyed or taking a risk that, even if it caused illness, it still filled their empty stomach.

Schemes are now up and running by which consumers can acquire such “end-of-life” produce at a snip of a price. The value for money of such offers varies, from being on the mean side to being on the opulently generous. Customers may be able to choose among general grocery packages, bakery produce and even a vegetarian selection. The rules are as follow:

·      You pay a fixed price for the package, usually advertised on an app for the day in question. It varies between EUR 3.99 and EUR 5.99 on the apps I’ve seen;

·      You DON’T know what you’ll get. That’s decided at the time of distribution, or shortly before, which is generally half an hour or so before the store is set to close its doors to the public. It depends what’s been left unsold on the store’s shelves. Yoghurt, cheese, packaged meat, chopped vegetables and the like are typical. With a bakery package, you can reckon on a loaf or two, pastries, bread rolls. We once got an expensive decorated cake – nice for New Year.

·      On the whole, you’ll pay around one-tenth of the value you receive. So, a EUR 3.99 package may contain goods with a regular price of around EUR 40. That is a considerable saving, but it means: (a) you cannot pick and choose what you receive, so what’s for dinner is what you get in the package; (b) you need to be sure to eat the produce within 24-48 hours, so as not yourself to have to throw away any of what you received; (c) if you own a freezer, some produce may be suitable for storing there to lengthen the time over which you can consume it.

Nevertheless, a number of questions arise:

(1)       The time span between the consumer ordering their package, the supermarket deciding what to put in it and the actual exchange (the consumer shows the supermarket their receipt on the app, the supermarket hands over the box of goods) is relatively short. I’ve never known it happen, but I suppose there is always a danger that the store in fact sells its entire stock of expiring produce by the time it comes to make up the package. A consumer will then get a refund but, just as the supermarket banked on having the goods to sell under the scheme, the consumer will have banked on having them for their meal and, given the restricted further shelf-life, may well have nothing else to fall back on. Would this ultimately entail stores over-ordering produce in order to be sure of having something to “dump” under the scheme?

(2)       The legal nature of the contract is interesting: the goods to be received are unspecified at the time of contracting (again: the consumer has no control whatsoever over what they will receive in their package); their taste in produce has to be, to say the least, catholic.

(3)       Are the homeless and destitute now bereft of one source of otherwise free meals that was formerly available to them?

One thing is for sure: those with a healthy appetite could pack away an entire package the evening they collect it, and would have consumed a repast sold entirely legally in terms of its “shelf-life date”: at the point of exchange, all shelf lives are still valid.

It is not a solution gone for in one store where I shop. It is a high-class grocer’s that prefers not to offer its customers “expiring” produce at a reduced price. However, it does give away produce that is “expired but unconscionable”, such as cakes, dried yeast, loaves of bread, gelatine pudding, that one can assume will be good for some time after the official expiry date. These items are occasionally made available at the check-out tills, with the invitation to “take as many as you want”, at no cost – but to customers who also have paid-for goods, is the implication. It, too, is an excellent goodwill gesture.

However, a further persuasive element to the scheme is the fact that most chilled produce comes packaged in plastic and/or cardboard. The conscientious customer will, after consuming the items, dispose of this packaging responsibly, whereas dumping the items results in the packaging going to land-fill or the incinerator. That’s a nice “plus” of the scheme.

Such schemes are sometimes voluntary, sometimes backed by force of law, sometimes engaged in as a gesture to customers, and sometimes will attract extra custom to a store where the user would not otherwise go. Occasionally, our local garage offers such packages and, there, you can imagine there is a fair selection of “snacks for on the go”, which fit less well into a family’s meal plan. But, if you’re a TV addict, they too can be a God-send.

My household once received a pomelo in its package. A what? Well, identifying it was the first task. Getting into it almost called for woodworking tools. Inside, it was as dry as a desert, and too dry as a dessert. Oops: one failure in so many success stories had to be expected!

With discretion and by shopping around, it can be built into any family’s shopping round. The watchwords are: be quick, be on time, and be open to what you get. And, if you think that it’s a poor deal rather than a deal for the poor, tell the app operator, and they’ll take your complaints seriously. The stores already come with “star ratings”!