Eli5/ Why are canned foods so cheap

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How
I got a huge thing of beautiful canned peaches so cheap

In: Economics

6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Fruit that is canned can be fruit with visible defects that consumers wont buy as fresh.

Ugly, misshapen tomatoes? Mash them up, cook them and can them instead of throwing them away.
Fresh fruit that is over/under sized? Dice them up and can them instead of throwing them away.

I worked in a pineapple cannery. Fresh, whole fruit had to be the perfect color, size and shape with no blemishes. It was picked by hand, loaded by hand into trucks and flown by air around the world.

Fruit that was ripe, but didn’t have the perfection of fresh was sent to the cannery. Color variations were ignored, misshapen fruit didn’t matter as long as it fit into the machines. The fruit was first processed into cylinders. Cylinders were trimmed of blemishes, then cut into rings. Any rings that had blemishes removed and were not perfect were diced, crushed or juiced. The skins were scraped and the flesh was used for crush or juice. The cores were squeezed for juice. All the leftover pulp and cores were sold to farmers as cattle feed.

Finally, the cans were sealed without labels and the labels were only applied when the orders came in and the cans shipped out the door. There were about 100 different labels that were applied to the same fruit from the same fields. The cans could sit for months in our warehouse before they were sold because harvest was only a few months long.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The price of fruit varies a lot throughout the year. Canning has always been about preserving food when it is plentiful for use when food is not. Canneries can buy fruit when it is cheapest and then sell it throughout the year when fresh is expensive. 70 years ago said fruit would be unavailable fresh unless bought in season.

It is also easy to transport. It is stable at any temperature, so no need for refrigeration. It doesn’t need to get anywhere quickly, because it is stable. It is easy to stack. Stores don’t need to worry about it going bad before selling it. All of this also contributes to a lower price.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Another reason (in addition to what others have said) is that sometimes it relates to timelines. For example, I know of a brand that requires vegetables to be processed within a certain amount of time of harvest to be sold fresh. If they don’t meet that timeline they’re frozen or canned. And there is a second time cutoff that if they are beyond that, they’ll be packaged as store brand instead of their own brand.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A lot of the cost of fresh produce is the care needed to transport them, refrigerated warehousing to store them, and the huge amount of produce that goes bad before sold (something like 30%). So make them more durable for transport and not dependent on climate control for transport or storage and give them a long shelf life so they don’t spoil… you can cut the costs.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Mass production. Ability to use ‘less than perfect’ fruit. Inexpensive long term storage.

Fresh requires expensive climate controlled storage and shipment, people will only buy perfect looking fruit and a percentage will go bad in transit.

Frozen requires expensive refrigeration in manufacture, shipment and sale.

So canning is cheaper.