Hungry, you grab an apple from the fruit bowl. You look for the little sticker and then scrape it off with your fingernail. Then it hits you: "What do the numbers on the sticker mean?"
 
As much as we don’t like them, the stickers attached to fruit do more than speed up the checkout process. The PLU code, or price lookup numbers tell you how the fruit was grown. By deciphering the numbers you can tell if the produce was grown with chemical fertilizers, is genetically modified, or organically grown.

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The coding was established by the Produce Marketing Association and the International Federation for Produce Coding to establish global standards for produce. Here’s how to de-code a sticker:

+ Four-digit numbers denote conventionally grown produce (that is, grown with chemicals)
+ Five digits beginning with 8, genetically modified
+ Five digits beginning with a 9 means organically grown.

Let’s look at a banana: A conventionally grown banana, may be marked 4011; a genetically modified one, 84011; and an organic one, 94011. The numbers can also vary with the size of the fruit: 3069 indicates a small Gravenstein apple, and 3070 a large one.

As handy as it might be at the checkout stand, the tiny sticker is unpopular not just with consumers but with the industry itself. They are so sticky that you can't get them off easily and to producers, the stickers are messy, expensive and inefficient. The days of the PLU sticker are numbered. Stay tuned: We’ll learn about the new technology in a future program.

Meanwhile, if, when you bite into an apple and realize half the sticker is gone, you’ll be happy to know that least the adhesive is considered food-grade.