Why Grocery Store Fruit Has That Little Sticker

It can happen to anyone when slicing apples for a pie or cutting up bell peppers for a salad. You go to put the slices into a bowl and notice that you've forgotten to take off the tiny sticker on so many fruits and vegetables, making you wonder why the sticker with seemingly random numbers is there in the first place. Known as a price look-up code (PLU), there is a lot more information in those four or five digits than just the price.

With thousands of varieties of fruits and vegetables, it's not surprising that many people do not know the difference between a Fiji and Honeycrisp apple. To avoid confusion at the checkout counter, in 1990, the Product Marketing Association (now merged with the United Fresh Produce Association to form the International Fresh Produce Association) introduced the identification system to encourage price accuracy at grocery checkout counters. Eleven years later, the International Federation for Produce Standards (IFPS) was formed by a coalition of global produce associations to oversee the implementation of the system worldwide.

Although the stickers don't give you as much information as the FDA's proposed new nutrition labels, the codes are also used on products sold individually to make inventory control more efficient, identify bulk produce items like nuts and herbs, distinguish between organic and inorganic products, and trace items through the distribution system. Often, the stickers will state the country or state of origin, but that is not required. Produce sold in multi-packs or containers generally have a PLU or a UPC number printed on the package.

The biggest benefit of the codes for shoppers is being able to distinguish between conventionally grown and organic produce. While the sticker might not tell you what organic actually means in the food world, it can tell you that you're holding an organic product. All individually sold produce items have codes of four digits, starting with the number three or four. If a product is organic, a nine is added to the front of the four-digit code for that specific item. IFPS plans to use five-digit codes, starting with 83000 or 84000, for conventionally-grown items once all of the 3000 and 4000 codes are exhausted. It has been reported in the past that numbers beginning with eight were supposed to be used to identify genetically-modified products, but the International Fresh Produce Association says that was not the intended purpose.

The codes are also helpful for using grocery store self-checkouts. Retailers with self-checkouts usually have systems that allow you to scan the code, enter it yourself, or look it up by punching in the name of the produce item.

Given the limited availability of code numbers, IFPS says it has no plans to use the codes to provide any further information about the items in the system, such as quality or stability, but has blocks of Retailer Assigned Numbers that retailers can use to give buyers more information about their products however they choose.