The Case of Produce T. W. Worth 1 Increased awareness and prevalence of food borne diseases in produce is challenging traditional notions of food quality. Consumers are finding that judging fresh produce according to visual characteristics does not preclude the presence of microbial pathogens.
Food borne illnesses caused by produce is a growing problem.
This is likely due to increased consumption of fresh, and therefore, uncooked produce. In response to the growth of food borne illness outbreaks, both the U.S. government and domestic producer associations are developing voluntary guidelines for the production and handling of fresh fruits and vegetables. A shortcoming of voluntary guidelines is that some firms may avoid improving food safety precautions because of the anonymity of the marketplace, that is, tracing back to find the source of a microbial pathogen may be very difficult. Also, fresh fruits and vegetables generally do not have labels indicating brand names. Since consumers cannot distinguish brand names, they may implicitly assign an average quality to each good.