The origin of the fruit stickers and can you eat them? – LLODO

If you go to the supermarket to buy fruit, you are probably familiar with the stickers on fruits, from oranges, guava to pears and most commonly apples. These stamps have a fairly new history, when Tom Mathison, an American gardener, started gluing them to fruit he was growing in the 1990s.

At first, it was just a marketing strategy for Mathison’s products, the fruits that he claims to be grown entirely organically.

But when these stickers are marketed by Mathison as a “Icon” of peace of mind, helping him grow his farm from just $89 to a company, Stemilt Growers, which is selling about 20 million boxes of apples, pears and cherries a year, the producers Other food producers also began to follow Mathison’s footsteps.

They put stamps on their fruit, with their own brand identity logo. Sometimes, stores also put their own stamps on them, for convenience in pricing and scanning payment codes. But for consumers, sometimes these stickers are inconvenient.

Children and clumsy adults still eat them sometimes. And when you peel off the stamp and there’s still a little bit of glue on the pods, you wonder if it’s okay to just eat it?

According to Ed Treacy, vice president of supply chain for the Product Marketing Association (PMA), which invented the standard product labeling system in the US, fruit stickers have three main ingredients: :

Firstly, it is ink to write information. The second is the substrate, usually paper, or plastic or plastic composite. Last is the adhesive, which you see as glue. “All three must be safe for humans.”, Treacy said.

That means if you or your kids accidentally ingest a stamp on an apple peel, it won’t give you food poisoning or any other health problems.

Because these stickers are affixed to food, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates them in the category of food additives and food contact substances.

This means that all fruit stickers in the US must be approved by the FDA. They will check whether the materials from the ink, paper and glue of the stamp are safe for humans or not? If any harmful substance is present in concentrations large enough to affect human health, that label will be banned.

The truth is that there are food stamps in the US that are imported from China, and the FDA will of course test them before they are released on the market.

However, an FDA spokesperson also said: “Because these labels are intended to be removed prior to product consumption, the FDA’s assessment did not include exposure due to frequent consumption of these labels. Even so, because these substances have low toxicity, any exposure from unintentional, occasional label consumption would not pose a health concern.”

In short, if you accidentally ingest a label on a fruit, it won’t do you any harm, as long as the label meets FDA standards. But you shouldn’t eat them often either.

The first is that they have no taste or nutritional value. The second is because sometimes there are exceptions. The FDA said that since it declared the stamps on fruit to be harmless and edible, there have been at least six lawsuits against the organization because consumers swallowed the stamps on fruit and suffocated.

One person choked on a sticker while driving. Fortunately, there have been no deaths. “As a savvy consumer, you should wash fruit and remove any extraneous labels before eating it, especially when giving it to children.”, an FDA spokesman said.

And if you don’t want to be bothered by these stickers, there are currently several companies developing biodegradable and completely edible stickers. In addition, some stores also use laser engraving technology instead of stickers to create barcodes on their products.

However, these technologies are still quite expensive. So if manufacturers had to choose between stamping or laser engraving for 20 million cartons of apples, the stamps would probably still be their priority. The responsibility of peeling them off, of course, will still be yours.

Refer to Nytimes