Solving the Great Potato Sticker Mystery
A grocery riddle leads to a deep dive on a ubiquitous supermarket detail.
We’ve all seen those little numbered stickers on produce, like the ones on the peaches in the photo shown above. They’re known in the produce biz as PLU codes, which is short for “price look-up.” As you probably know, each numerical code corresponds to a particular type of produce; in this case, the “4401” on the stickers indicates that these are white flesh peaches.
For reasons that have never been clear to me, some types of produce almost always have PLU stickers (apples, for example, and most other fruit), while other types usually don’t have them (onions, zucchini, corn). One product that falls into the latter category is potatoes, which in my experience are never PLU’d.
Or at least that’s what I thought until a few weeks ago, when I was at my local ShopRite supermarket and saw this:
As you can see, the Yukon golds in the upper bin were stickered but the red spuds in the lower bin were not. An adjacent bin of Idaho baking potatoes was also sticker-free:
At first I thought the green rectangular stickers on the Yukon golds were price stickers, not PLUs. But a closer look revealed that they all carried the code “4727”:
Sure enough, that’s the code for Yukon golds.
The sight of potatoes with PLU stickers seemed bizarre to me. But was it really so uncommon, or had I just never noticed it before? I posted a query on Facebook, where lots and lots of people assured me that they’d never seen PLU’d potatoes either.
Then, while looking more closely at the photos I’d taken, I noticed something else: PLU labels are usually supplied by the produce distributors or wholesalers, but the Yukon gold stickers carried the logo of ShopRite — the supermarket where they were being sold.
So these PLU stickers were apparently added at the supermarket. But why go to the trouble of doing that when potatoes usually don’t get PLU’d? And why did the Yukons get stickered while all the other tubers didn’t?
I figured maybe it was just a one-time blip. But when I went back to the ShopRite a few days ago, I found the exact same situation. So I approached a nearby produce employee who was stacking avocados, introduced myself by saying, “This is probably going to sound like a ridiculous question…” (I’ve gotten very good at saying that over the years), and asked him what was the deal with the stickers.