Whole Foods encourages shoppers to bring their own shopping bags and prides itself on an ability to provide healthy options to shoppers in the best possible way. But a recent packaging flub is making us shake our heads.
A photo of peeled oranges sitting in plastic containers at a Whole Foods location in California, or rather, an utter misuse of packaging, sent the Internet abuzz when it was posted to Reddit with the caption, "Are people really that lazy nowadays?"
Much like the reaction to the asparagus water debacle of 2015, when the brand came under fire for briefly selling water with stalks of asparagus submerged inside, many Twitter users were quick to question the brand's motives. Nathalie Gordon tweeted: "If only nature would find a way to cover these oranges so we didn't need to waste so much plastic on them."
Among the over 17,000 retweets which included other instances of stores foregoing produce's natural casing for something synthetic, came a response from the brand itself. In a Tweet, Whole Foods apologized for the unfortunate packaging, vowing to pull the oranges from the shelf and "leave them in their natural packaging: the peel."
A spokeswoman from Whole Foods further explained to The Huffington Post, "a lot of our customers love the convenience of our cut produce offerings, but this was a simple case where a handful of stores experimented with a seasonal product spotlight that wasn't fully thought through. We're glad some customers pointed it out so we could take a closer look."
Look, we get it. Peeling oranges can be a daunting task, almost as much as say, boiling your own eggs or chopping up your own celery. But orange you glad this product got taken off the shelf?