Those blasted fruit stickers

July 24, 2024 • 12:45 pm

You must have experienced this frustration: trying to get those stickers off of individual pieces of fruit without ripping the skin. I suppose it can be done with care, but I don’t have the time. Plus they now have ways to emboss the fruit without stickers, like using lasers.

My lunch apple, before:

My lunch apple, after sticker removal.  The unavoidable crater appears:

Now clearly this isn’t a cosmic issue, but it’s one Andy Rooney would have talked about, and now that he’s gone somebody has to!

31 thoughts on “Those blasted fruit stickers”

  1. It is a cosmic issue! I find more upscale grocers have easier to remove stickers. You can’t have fruit in a fruit bowl showing stickers… it ruins the aesthetic!

  2. My comment is not related to this post, but to this website, in general. I am so grateful to have found WEIT. Although I think I lean in a little different direction politically (I guess I lean right because I don’t believe in government as panacea), I appreciate your balanced approach to important topics.

    I also have no idea how you find time to post so often. I am retired and about 300 posts a year is all I can manage.

    Thank you and be well.

    2. I too am leftward (left of some people here, I suspect), but welcome!
      I too don’t know how Jerry does it.

  3. They are designed to adhere to fruits and vegetables so they can’t be exchanged easily. Organic produce is much costlier than conventionally grown produce. They don’t want consumer swapping stickers.

    1. In fact it does matter here at the Canadian-US border. If you want to carry US apples on a plane from Canada to US, they better all have US stickers and Customs doesn’t object. And vv. As for removal, They usually have a no-glue corner so start there. Do it with a quick jerk if you know what I mean.

  5. We buy most of our fruit from a small shop specialising in local produce. The only labels are on fruit or veg that comes from more than five miles away. Of course, it’s a bit more expensive, including the stuff we can’t grow in the UK, but hey.

    They also sell locally produced bread, cheeses, preserves and wonderful smoked salmon, smoked eel, gravadlax and other specialities (smoked duck breast, anyone?) from another local artisan business. No labels to peel!

    1. Actually that may be not the better idea… specially for organic products. Organic products have their alleged benefits at the cost of productivity, which means that for, let’s say a ton of product, non organic needs less terrain than organic products, which put more pressure on the environment. This means that organic products are, ironically, worse for the environment.

      And for locally produced, it could actually be worse also. The energetic cost of transporting to local retailers from local producers for the global population (in terms of fuel for the transport itself, and running facilities for storing or other) could be surely bigger in comparison to greater production facilities with bigger distribution networks, which would be more efficient. For example, it would be cheaper an less energy consuming transporting 10 tons of produce in a 10 ton truck than in 10 1ton trucks.

    2. This local shop selling local fruit sounds wonderful. I’m greatly missing a local farm market that shut down due to the death of the owner. I do grow a lot of vegetables, weather permitting, and bake bread every week.

  6. Yep – no progress here.

    Eggplant stickers are near permanent sometimes.

    The tomato stickers get on the bags – it’s funny…

    Pfff…

    1. Do they design stickers like this so people can’t easily remove in the store for nefarious purposes?

      Like moving a low priced sticker to another more expensive item?

  7. These stickers are a constant source of annoyance! If you think ones on apples are bad, try to get ones off softer fruit, like peaches and plums. The practice seems to vary with the company that wholesales fruit like bananas. At one store the banana company puts stickers on every single banana in the bunch; at a different store, with a different supplier, there will be only one or two stickers on a bunch of six. I dislike buying bagged fruit or vegetables because of the extra plastic, but the one advantage is that there are no stickers to contend with!

  9. When I was in college I peeled one of those stickers off a piece of fruit at the grocery store and placed it in my jacket pocket. It came off rather easily. When a friend and I left the store, we were accosted by security. “Alright, I know you took it. Give it back or I’ll call the police.” “Give what back?” (Not being a shoplifter, it hadn’t yet dawned on me what he was talking about.) “Don’t be stupid. I saw you take it. In the produce department.” “Oh! That’s right, by the Kiwi stand.” “Right. Give it to me.” “It was nothing, really.” “Do you want me to call the police?” “Okay, if you really want it back.” I put my hand in the pocket, placed the sticker on my thumb, and held it up for him to read. It said, “Eat me when I’m soft.”

    He let us go. I kept the sticker.

  11. These stickers are not that sticky in Europe, at least Spain, for all I know. What I would do, as you have to wash your fruit anyway, is washing with slighly hot water. Maybe even cold water could facilitate the procces,

  12. I read somewhere that you can eat them and they won’t kill you. Sad that you had to deface a perfectly good apple—before devouring it in its entirety.

    Here’s another annoyance. When I typed the word apple in the previous sentence, my iPad changed it to Apple. Apple will continue to do that until apple (as a fruit) is no more.

    1. Because without them the cashier would have to be able to identify which apples you bought when there are often a dozen or more kinds of apples! And you could lie if they didn’t know. Or you could–god forbid–MIX DIFFERENT ONES!

  18. Those little annoying fruit stickers are Godsends

    Sure they speed up the check out process, but what they do for inventory management, distribution and delivery – is pure grocery magic. Cost/benefit off the charts.

    First tried in Ohio in 1974!

  19. I visited an orange packing warehouse and watched a machine putting stickers n the fruit at the rate of about two a second. I asked the manager why these stickers were going on and his reply was that shoppers bought oranges with stickers in preference to those without. I guess that oranges are not apples; when you peel an orange you lose the sticker.

  20. The little tag on the right should be loose to slide a nail under; but I agree, they are a waste of resources and the time taken removing them, as well as contributing to micro-plastics in the environment!

  21. Agreed this is really annoying. Are there farmer’s markets anywhere in Chicago? I recently started going to a farmer’s market near where I live instead of the grocery store and, among other benefits, it seems like there’s no necessity for them to put stickers on the apples.

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