'Ugly Fruit' Coming to 300 Florida Walmarts

All of a sudden the produce only a mother could love is "in". The ugly stuff has been tested in Walmart's supermarkets in the United Kingdom and it sells like hotcakes.

So America's largest grocer says, let's give "ugly fruit" a test drive in America. And where better than Florida -- a state of 20 million hungry souls with 24/7 shopping privileges.

Walmart announced Wednesday that starting this week it will pilot sales of weather-dented apples at a discount in 300 of its stores in the Sunshine State. Call this a kind of Cinderella story: the soot-covered stepsister left sweeping up ashes finally gets to go to the ball.

“We’re excited to announce that after months of discussion, a brand of apples from Washington state, called “I’m Perfect,” will make its debut in Walmart stores this week,” Shawn Baldwin, senior vice president for global food sourcing, produce and floral, for Wal-Mart U.S., writes in a company blog post. “We’re proud to be the first retailer to bring these apples to you.” 

The apples will be sold in 2- and 5-pound bags.

Ugly produce is a fact of life on the farm, farmers tells me. Sometimes the dents and scars are so minor you wouldn’t think twice about buying them. They’re perfectly edible, delicious and "just as nutritious as their unmarred brethren — or perhaps even more so," I'm told. But their cosmetic challenges (think hail-pocked apples or curvy leeks) have traditionally kept them out of retail stores.

Baldwin sadly points out that imperfect fruits and vegetables now end up in landfills,  contributing to food waste as they rot, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. I don't know about that, but it's what this Walmart fellow claims.

Across the U.S., there’s no good documentation of how much produce gets tossed because of cosmetic imperfections, and losses vary from crop to crop, says JoAnne Berkenkamp, a senior advocate for food and agriculture at the Natural Resources Defense Council. But “we’ve typically found that growers reported [cosmetic-related] losses ranging up to 20 percent of production in a given year. It could be higher in years of bad weather.”

For apples, Walmart claims blemish-related losses can reach as high as 30 percent.

My English inlaws tell me Walmart’s UK grocery chain, Asda, sells what they call “wonky veg” boxes. Each box contains 11 pounds of various misshapen fruits and vegetables. Cost? The equivalent of $4.60, "and you'd better get in there early if you want one."

No further details on specifically where the scratch-and-dent fruit will be rolled out in Florida or how much it will cost.