Fruit Stickers Do Have a Purpose

You know when you shop at the supermarket and it seems like every fruit and vegetable has a little sticker on it with a seemingly random collection of letters and numbers? It turns out that those stickers do have a purpose (other than to annoy and confuse you).

Jay Weinstein cracks the produce code on his blog to help you identify the difference between organic an non-organic produce, just in case you were starting to wonder if fruits and vegetables are all the same. It turns out: they’re not.

Price look-up (PLU) codes are an international numbering standard that identifies each type of produce, so that computerized cash registers can ring up the cost of fruits and vegetables automatically. The code also lets consumers whether the item is a conventional, organic or genetically modified (GM) crop.

Conventional produce carries a 4-digit code. For organic or GM produce, an extra number is added to the beginning of the series, making it a 5-digit code. If the starting number of the 5-digit code is a 9, it is organic. If the starting number of the 5-digits begins with an 8, it is from a genetically modified crop.

The codes are on every item of produce, from lettuce to apples, but often get mixed together or placed in the wrong bins, so check the labels on your produce the same way you check labels on other products.