Whether it’s making lemonade with an underripe mango, tempura from tomatoes, or cupcakes from overripe bananas, simple stickers found on fruit and vegetables in Belgian supermarkets provide recipe ideas to help reduce food waste.
These stickers also suggest suitable recipes for each stage of ripeness.
According to the United Nations, 17% of the world’s food production went to waste in 2019, the equivalent of 931 million tonnes of food. In Europe, an estimated 87.6 million tonnes are wasted every year at some point in the supply chain, from production to transport to sale.
And when it comes to this last stage, established standards eliminate an astronomical quantity of fruit and vegetables that do not fit requirements for size or appearance. These are the famous “ugly” fruit and vegetables.
The European Commission proposed in April to put an end to distribution standards which reject around 30% of fruit and vegetables, which are then used to make compotes, pet food, or even thrown in the trash!
While some retailers sell this produce at discount prices, in Belgium, a supermarket chain has gone one step further by providing consumers with more educational support.
The Makro chain of stores has developed a series of round stickers on which a colour scale can be seen. The middle of each sticker is cut out to reveal the skin of the fruit or vegetable underneath, which makes it easy to identify the item’s degree of ripeness.
The label also indicates what kind of food can be made with this ingredient, according to its colour and, therefore, its ripeness. When it’s still green, a banana can be fried, for example, while when it turns brown, it can be puréed and added to a cupcake recipe.
Designed to reduce waste, this campaign encourages consumers to cook with fruit and vegetables even when they’re underripe.
In a video promoting the initiative, the retailer points out that the average extended lifetime for the fruit and vegetables bearing these stickers is six days.
While it’s often supermarkets and mass retailers who impose these kinds of standards on the sale of fruit and vegetables, they in turn are calling on consumers to reduce food waste.
Makro is not the only retailer to have developed an awareness-raising initiative. In Puerto Rico, the Caribbean island’s largest supermarket chain, SuperMax, has developed an Instagram filter that suggests ways of repurposing products that have passed their best-before dates.
Often, eating foods beyond this date will pose no danger to health, but the taste or texture can be altered.