Affixed to apples, bananas, peppers and many other fruits and vegetables, these number stickers are very useful and can help inform your purchases. But then, what do they mean?
Surely you have already wondered what these stickers are for. apples at the mall. These encryption stickers are the first Designed to facilitate inventory controlor work at the cash desk, but they can also be useful to you !
PLU codes, which stand for price search or price code in French, are assigned by the International Federation for Product Standards (IFPS) with the aim of simplifying inventory management and Facilitate the task of the cashier. Thanks to the PLU label, the latter can easily determine whether the apple chosen by the customer is being sold at the right price. In fact, this string of 4 or 5 numbers makes it possible to know several parameters determining the selling price of a product, for example its size, variety or culture style. Well, you too, you can Decode part of this code!
- Fruit or Vegetable in Conventional Farming: Most of these codes start with 3 or 4 and are 4 digits long. However, there is an exception: sometimes it happens that it is preceded by the number 8, and the code after that consists of 5 digits. Example: 83,000.
- Organic fruit or vegetables: The label identifying the fruit or vegetable produced in organic farming begins with 9 and consists of 5 digits in total.
“For example, PLU code 4011 designates a banana It is grown using traditional methods, while the PLU code 94011 indicates organic bananasThe French Agency for Fresh Fruits and Vegetables told AFP.
Contrary to the information circulating on the Internet, the symbols that begin with the number 8 Do not designate genetically modified fruits and vegetables :”Although the prefix “8” (83000-84999) was intended for GMO products, it was never used in retailsaid Jane Proctor, Chair of the Product Identification Committee at IFPS. Number 8 is actually used for reference New varieties!
