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Top UK Supermarket Laser Prints Labels On Avocados To Reduce Waste (telegraph.co.uk)
One of the largest British retailers in London, M&S, is opting in for laser-printed barcodes to reduce paper waste. "The labels, which are etched onto fruit's skins with lasers instead of stickers, will save 10 tons of paper and five tons of glue every year according to M&S," reports The Telegraph. The labels will be etched into the skins of avocados, but "could soon be introduced to other fruit and vegetables and adopted by other supermarkets which are looking for new waste reduction techniques." The labels themselves include the shop logo, best before date, country of origin and product code for entering at the till. What's more is that the avocado's skin is the only area impacted by the lasers -- none of the fruit gets damaged. Bruce66423 writes: Print the information usually on the packaging to reduce waste. Excellent idea -- although the Aldi (the radically cheap, all own brand chain) alternative is to leave avocados untouched and get the cashiers to enter the code.
Employees and customers are next.
Hopefully apples too - anyone else annoyed by little stickers on apples?
because why?
When will they tattoo foreheads for a universal id system? Will people then be sold in supermarkets too?
I used to work with a guy who stuck them to the side of his monitor. Over time there were so many I reckoned the thing was ready to tip over. And that was before those fancy-pants flatscreen jobbies too.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It doesn't work on majority of fruits. Most of the information they print is redundant. Nobody needs the shop logo. The country of origin is already printed on the bin. The product code can be memorized/looked up by the cashier. That only leaves the best-by date, which, in the case of avocados, isn't very reliable.
What the hell does one of the largest British retailers in London mean? They're either a large British retailer or they aren't. Britain is not London and similarly, London is not Britain.
M&S (Marks & Spencer) are a national food and clothing retailer and aren't only in London. Maybe they're piloting their laser printed fruit in London but for God sake, stop saying London when you don't need to.
Some packaging is way over the top, and the vast majority of household waste at least for me is in the form of packaging...
Virtually no packaging can be reused, not much biodegrades and only some can be recycled through an energy intensive process of melting it all down again.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Uh oh one more reason for millennials to go even more wild on avocado toast #no_home http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/16...
seen it too!
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
The article states it is the code to enter at the till. So why not let the cashier employee remember the code. Window dressing "we are so environmental responsible"
In Sweden we generally weigh the fruit and veg ourselves. One bag of fruit, one printed label. You then scan the label with your barcode reader like any other item you purchase. For item price wares, there is a barcode to scan placed next to the fruit bin on the description tag. It can be improved, but it sure saves time by not having to haul everything up at the checkout. (Unless you are unlucky enough to run into a random spot check...)
Onions? I've never seen stickers on onions. By-the-piece onions (around here at least) come in three flavors - red, white, and yellow. Or by the bag, already labeled. I can see why you would need labels on apples as there are about a dozen varieties, even at small grocery stores. Most everything else is unique enough that you can tell what it is, although some cashiers seem to be clueless about "exotic" fruits like kiwis, dragonfruit, and mangos.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
How many of you immediately thought "banana" when you saw that subject line. I'm not even a checker. I just use self-check on a regular basis. If I bought avocados I'd probably start remembering that one too. The self-check has alphabetical lookup if you don't know the code. Any decent checker is not only going to know the code by heart, they probably see them in their dreams.
The Aldi folks have it right. There's no need for a sticker or defacement of common produce items. People know these codes, and the machines assist them. Next gen self-check will probably just recognize the avocados when you put them on the scale, you won't have to enter anything.
The next logical step is for the shop, or supplier, to print ads on the fruit.
My local supermarket started individually shrink-wrapping fruit for your environmentally destructive pleasure. :-(
The Telegraph article shows a picture of a mango with caption "Avocados will be labelled by laser". /.
Editors are asleep? Sounds like they should look for a job on
Also, avoid mangoes labelled "Brazil" at all cost: Asian mangoes are the best. Seek out yellow honey mangoes from Pakistan or India.
Here they don't even bother labeling produce. You just grab what you want and the cashier or you at a self checkout lane enters in what it is, how many and the register weighs it to make sure everything is good. Of course people can game the system by saying their super organic gmo free fruit is just regular cheap fruit but as far as I can see most places operate on the honor system in that regard and everything works out fine.
M&S is not top. They continue to lose market share, still the 6th largest retailer in UK but basically obsolete. Most people seem to go there because they have reliable range of girls' knickers and stuff like that, if they can ignore the fact that M&S favours Israeli suppliers reliying on cheap Palestinian labour from the illegally occupied territories.
They are using these hand-held engravers in the wrong market.
The obvious best use is in cosmetic body modification. This, combined with normal tattooing, would be a powerful new addition to the body mod scene I think.
There is already scarification, which is done with hot brands or razor blades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This would be much quicker, and could do much more intricate designs on skin. Combined with traditional inking it could lead to very nice tattoos indeed.
Seriously- branding fruit? Wrong market. Humans WANT to be branded. Take their money.
Kiwis aren't fruit, they're birds.
They're also endangered so you shouldn't be eating them either.
Or do you mean Kiwifruit?
How about the dead children ? Can we get their name printed as well ? Avocados uses up to around 130 liters of water per fruit, in an area with way too little drinkign water. So eating avocado is killing the poor, as the Avocado mafia monopolizes water for their plantations.
Stop eating avocado.
http://www.konbini.com/us/life...
To produce three avocados, you need 264 gallons of water = 1m^3 = 1000 liters. That is more water than consumed by a child in one year.
No, not the "666", mark-of-the-beast guys. Yes, those too. But I'm talking about a more local conspiracy (frankly, I haven't met anyone outside of Europe that considers this real, shows that not all loonies that can come up with insane bullshit are located in the US), that those bars can act as some sort of "antenna" and absorb "frequencies" from various sources, which then affect the product, and of course in a negative way.
But luckily, there's hope! You can buy a Sharpie... ok, of course it's not a simple Sharpie, it's an energetically activated (insert more mumbo-jumbo woo here) for the low, low price of 30-50 bucks, and with this you can "connect" those bars and neutralize them that way.
By now some of makers of products aimed at ... let's say energetically challenged people have started to print their barcodes "neutralized", pretty much saying "if they want it that way, it doesn't bother us, so ... let them have it...".
We're now at the point where they seriously demand hazard pay for people working the supermarket checkout.
So no, idiocy is by no means a privilege of the US, we can do it just as well!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Which country is this? Never heard of this practice.
simply doesn't work. Too many of them steal from their employer by entering the wrong code to sell items as something cheaper, especially the items sold under the marketing name "organic." I used to work for a POS system, and we tried several methods to reduce theft by the cashiers, but none worked.
So basically tomorrow some headline-grabber piece of crap pseudo doctor will say lasering avocados causes autism. Thanks, UK doctors.
No, not the "666", mark-of-the-beast guys. Yes, those too. But I'm talking about a more local conspiracy (frankly, I haven't met anyone outside of Europe that considers this real, shows that not all loonies that can come up with insane bullshit are located in the US), that those bars can act as some sort of "antenna" and absorb "frequencies" from various sources, which then affect the product, and of course in a negative way.
If you'd RTFS, you'd see they aren't printing barcodes, they're printing the Arabic numeral code for the item to enter by hand at the checkout. A barcode would not be practical on an avocado, due to their bumpy, dark skin. It would be hard to get straight lines of good enough contrast.
But I enjoyed your rant. Off-topic as it was.
Avocado is a fruit??
Why not use vision systems to identify the product?
M&S brand coconuts with their logo, expiry date, and the till code as well. I don't know if it's laser'd or just plain old branding, but they've been doing that for a while now.
They still wrap the bloody things in shrinkwrap for reasons unknown.
yes, www.dotcomforwardslash.com is my real URL.
No fruit, no vegetable with stickers, marks or a "company logo" (how perverse is *that*?). And a considerable fraction sold by those who planted and harvested them.
Of course that won't cover everything, but I try to maximize that part.
Aldi in the Netherlands does scan its products, the cashier does not have to enter a code for every product. They used to do that, and I must say the old method was a lot faster. I've always had some kind of admiration for the Aldi cashiers to memorize all those product codes. I guess Aldi does not trust its cashiers anymore...
Sig?
fruits like kiwis
Kiwis aren't fruit, they're birds.
They're also endangered so you shouldn't be eating them either.
Or do you mean Kiwifruit?
... And then there are New Zealanders also calling themselves (or is it being called) Kiwis.
Captcha: misfits 3:-)
One guy walks into a store and asks for a pack of cigarettes. As usual, to discourage smoking, there is a warning printed on the pack:
"Smoking causes impotence"
The customer hands back the cigarette pack and tells the store clerk:
"This is disgusting! Can I have a pack on which it says that smoking cause cancer ?"
Back in the early 80's, when I was working for a UK company called Laser-Scan, mostly doing digital cartography, we had a request about using a laser to brand bar-codes onto pigs as they went into the abbatoir. I can't remember anything coming of it, though.
ARABIC numeral code?!
New conspiracy theory! The avocadoes carry encrypted messages to the terrorist cells!
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
You were putting labels on fruits?
We don't even do that here, it's pretty obvious that you're buying an avocado, so the teller can just add it at the cash register.
You knew exactly what he meant, pedant.
Only if the lazer works on renewable energy source
In the UK Kiwis are fruit. They may alternately be flightless birds but we generally encounter the fruit more frequently.
Nobody here calls it kiwifruit.
M&S are one of the UKs largest retailers, but only about 60% of their revenue is from food. See here. Which means that they are outside of the top 10 in terms of grocery sales.They are a small player in terms of food sales who specialize in luxury foods. This is just a curiosity news piece about a small specialist retailer who have found another way to push their luxury brand and its values.
Found the person from Morganville!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Same here. We would rather call the animal a "kiwibird" than the berry a "kiwifruit". Of course, some people refer to them as "chinese strawberries".
A guy I know used to make a point of only buying packs that said they caused problems with pregnancy and then when someone criticized him for smoking he'd point out that THESE cigarettes were only hazardous to pregnant women.
Laser burning a barcode on an avocado skin will pollute the air with more CO2, you insensitive clod!
The text on the package is German (with a '.de' URL printed on the box), and it's on the German-language Wikipedia, so I'd say the country is Germany. I didn't notice anything like this when I visited a few months ago, but I went to (what I understand to be) a regular grocery store, not specialized for 'wellness products' or whatever the local euphemism for 'woo' is.
IIRC the epicenter of that loonie quake is Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, here they are called "european chinese strawberries".
Kiwi and kiwifruit are synomyms. The only differences being that the former word has multiple meanings and the latter is hardly ever used. Moreover, if you really want to be pedantic, the technical term is Chinese gooseberry; 'kiwi' and 'kiwifruit' are merely marketing terms invented to make the fruit appear to be native to New Zealand.
if you really want to be pedantic, the technical term is Chinese gooseberry
If you wanted to be pedantic you should have used the term Actinidia deliciosa. That is commonly known as the fuzzy kiwifruit, there are a few other species of the genus Actinidia that are also edible with various names.
...applying this technology to blueberries. Just saying.
Ten tons of paper and five tons of glue is what the article says. A single sheet of A4 paper weighs about 4.5 grams. The FDA supposedly has a few adhesives that are safe for food. I don't quite know the chemical makeup, but it's probably similar to polyvinyl acetate that Elmer's glue uses. Polyvinyl acetate has a mass of 1.19 g/cm^3. A sheet of A4 paper has a surface area of 236.22 cm^2 and a thickness of about 0.0102 cm, ergo a total volume of 2.409 cm^3. This is 2.867 grams of glue per sheet if the glue were applied at the same thickness as the paper. A sheet of A4 weighs 4.5 grams. That's a 1.570:1 ratio and not 2:1. And because you know the glue surface would be thinner that the paper, that ratio would be even smaller. It doesn't make sense to be using that much glue is what I'm getting at.
And that was before those fancy-pants flatscreen jobbies too.
Flatscreen or not, I suspect a jobbie would make a shite monitor.
Onions? I've never seen stickers on onions. By-the-piece onions (around here at least) come in three flavors - red, white, and yellow.
No Vidalias? Pearl Onions? Shallots? Spring Onions? Ramps? Cippolini?... ummm... I'm sure there are more...
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Well, here they are called "european chinese strawberries".
I call them African American European Chinese Strawberries
It really cannot be that difficult to make the checkout systems simply recognize unpacked food using computer vision....
0x or or snor perron?!
Nobody here calls it kiwifruit.
You do not speak for the UK!
I call them Kiwi Fruit
My wife calls them Kiwi Fruit.
We should have a referendum to decide - do you want to LEAVE the word fruit off, or do you want it to REMAIN!
In light of this information, I humbly propose that in order to preserve our most precious of natural resources, rather than growing avocados for human consumption, we adopt the more economical and ethical solution of raising children to be used for this purpose in their stead.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
Aldi hasn't been all-own-brand for years. They sell things like coca-cola here in the Netherlands...
In the Netherlands the new system is - you take your own hand-held scanner, go to the e.g. avocadoes, put say 5 in the basket, scan the price-label [you need only one per type of good] and you are done. No need to spend money laser etching the bar code on every fruit. Plus, no need for cashier. After the system was implemented I never looked back....funnily enough most people still prefer the interaction with the human - often I see long lines at the cashiers while the self-scanning machines stand idle...
Mad Magazine Barcode Cover
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
I wonder if this could be done for more products. I've seen a lot of cases where various stores have been caught changing dates on food to something that expires further in the future. If it's laser-etched etc that would be a lot harder to do.
Not sure if one could laser-etch a steak though, but if they did a permanent mark on the package it could help prevent re-labelling.
They could just not label them like many other grocers. Try training your checkers better.
WTF?
I used to work with a guy who stuck them to the side of his monitor. Over time there were so many I reckoned the thing was ready to tip over. And that was before those fancy-pants flatscreen jobbies too.
It's probably not a good idea to stick onions (or avacados) on the side of your monitor.
In the UK Kiwis are fruit. They may alternately be flightless birds
If you are in the UK, you should know that "alternately" means back-and-forth. As is "we meet on alternate Tuesdays", or "alternating current".
Alternatively, you may be speaking American.
I see them try to stick labels on onions, most of them get left on the stand when the outer layer of the onion skin peels off.
gooseberries, not strawberries.
Onions or avocados? You must have a bizarre idea of what apples are.
That space is important.
As, has been highlighted, is the iv in alternatively.
Neither in germany.
If the Whole Foods purchase goes through I will not be at all surprised to see this at Whole Foods quickly after the merger. Amazon has the computing power and technical expertise to pull it off and will allow them to churn more customers through the same (or fewer) cashiers which is the type of cost savings that Amazon will be looking for.
Now if they can just figure out a way to make idiots realize that if you're in the blue line you wait for the blue number we'd be golden (yes I grudgingly use Whole Paycheck, in Manhattan they've pretty much killed off all the other decent "neighborhood" grocers).
As someone else already said: just have the cashier enter the code. Really, it's not that hard. Even at self-checkout stations, you can pick from a picture menu, or if you're clever you can remember the code; bananas are '4011', for instance. Then they'll not only save on paper and adhesive but on expensive laser printing systems.
I find it interesting that M&S would be so concerned about such things, when all their plastic packaging that I've seen contains a note: "Plastic: Not Currently Recycled"
We don't call them kiwifruit in the US, either. They are just called "kiwi".
He's probably a kiwi (alternately a NZ resident and a tasty-but-endangered flightless bird).
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
By-the-piece onions ... come in three flavors - red, white, and yellow.
So how is life with synesthesia? :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Kiwis aren't fruit, they're birds. They're also endangered so you shouldn't be eating them either.
Or do you mean Kiwifruit?
They're people from New Zealand and, I imagine, some of them are delicious. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
how is this any better/different than using inkjet or dot matrix stamp type markers for produce that Ive been seeing for awhile now?
Lots less energy needed to apply, and water soluble, edible inks aren't a big deal.
... makes sense.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
This is what happens when you don't read the title bar of the comments. Besides, onions are well known for their properties as velociraptor repellent. I have onions on my desk and have yet to experience a raptor attack.
No "alternately" is wrong usage in the USA as well.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If you are in the UK you should know that we refer to that as "typing Americanisms", not "speaking American".
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Nobody here calls it kiwifruit.
Yet you call beets beetroot.
Some of us are, others, not so much...
The labels aren't really essential on apples. When I worked as a cashier, all the varieties sold were visually distinguishable. Because much of the fresh produce was unlabelled, the cashiers were regularly tested on being able to identify a random selection.
Kiwis are people, you insensitive clod!
Only a monitor?
My local mechanic has the entire inside of the workshop door plastered with those.
Do they even have kiwi birds? You could trick buyers who wants kiwis. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Bullshit. In 40 years living in the UK, I never heard of a fruit being called "kiwi".
Unless you're talking about a particularly flamboyant New Zealander.
Someone is confusing bar codes with RFID chips.
Gad, I remember going to a hearing in Sacramento about a law to require subcutaneous RFID insertion on every school age child. Talk about a pedophile's wet dream for stalking tech.
NRRPT/RCT
Because the farmer grows beets, pulls them from the ground, cuts the green stuff off the top and feeds it to their sheep (or cattle), then sells the beetroot to buyers at a considerably higher per-ton price than for un-topped beets.
Other parts of the country use "beet" to refer to the uncooked food and "beetroot" for the cooked version. Witness the Alan ("Amstrad") Sugar biography. But I think that's a London usage.
You might not know the reason for the usage, but that doesn't mean that there is no reason.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"