There is a new snack brand called RIND which is taking an innovative approach to “up-cycle” fruit that is fully edible but which doesn’t meet grocery shelf standards for appearance. Normally that sort of fruit goes into products like juice, sauce or jam. Some food system critics argue that it is wasteful to reject produce for “cosmetic” issues like being too large or too small, misshapen or discolored. In fact it does not make sense to incur the cost and resource footprint of getting such fruits or vegetables all the way to retail if they are likely to end up as uneaten food waste. It makes more sense to send it to those “side-streams” like juices or sauce and derive some income. That can actually be important to the overall economics of a packing house operation. Unfortunately, cheap imports of things like juice can undermine that value.