Of Apples and Stickers

My first post. So much pressure. Is has to be insightful. It has to say . . . something.

I'll start with something simple: stickers. On fruit. Those little stickers that are now attached to every individual apple, orange, banana, and every other piece of fruit you and I buy at the grocery store. There must be a special place in hell for the person who invented these things. Not only do you have to peel one or two stickers off every time you want to eat a piece of fruit (probably using more water to wash the thing in the process,) but often the skin of the fruit comes off with the sticker. They can't be good for the kitchen pipes either, as they inevitably go down the drain, rather than the garbage.

And what about organic produce -- is the glue used to hold the sticker to my organic apples also organic? (hhhmmm new product idea: organic glue.)

I know what problem the stickers solved: the consumer gets to the grocery store checkout line, the clerk doesn't know whether they're Fuji Apples or Gala Apples, doesn't know how much to charge and either guesses incorrectly or calls someone to clue him in, slowing down his queue. But this is the store's problem, not the consumer's problem. The producer's customer is the store, not the consumer who ultimately buys the product. The consumer's needs were not considered.

So putting on my Product Manager hat, how would I have solved this problem. How about printing the fruit ID code (or whatever it's actually called) onto the fruit itself with contrasting (organic?) food-coloring. Now eating a piece of fruit is just a matter of washing off the food color; no stickers to gum up the pipes, no mystery glue to ingest.

Anyone have other suggested solutions? Feel free to post in the comments.