Whole Foods Sells Pre-Peeled Oranges

Enjoy oranges but find peeling them to be a chore so onerous that it makes you disinclined to purchase the fruit?

Apparently, Whole Feeds believes that there exists a consumer group that would answer “yes” to that question, as a California location (and a few others) of the high-end organic grocery chain recently offered peeled oranges in plastic containers for sale.

As The Huffington Post shared, a shopper’s photo of the item in question first appeared on Reddit last week with the caption, “Are people really that lazy nowadays?” In short time, consumers on social media were inspired not only to share the picture of pre-peeled and packaged oranges but post other reminders of instances where Whole Foods had inexplicably cast off natural foods’ inherent “packaging” for that of its own — including the infamous “Asparagus Water,” which consisted of three sprigs of the vegetable plopped into a bottle of spring water.

Following, by HuffPo’s count, more than 17,000-plus retweets of such postings, Whole Foods itself (via its official Twitter account) finally weighed in on the matter, responding to a tweet from one Nathalie Gordon (who had shared a photo of the pre-peeled oranges with the remark, “If only nature would find a way to cover these oranges so we didn’t need to waste so much plastic on them”) by stating:

“Definitely our mistake. These have been pulled. We hear you, and we will leave them in their natural packaging: the peel.”

A spokeswoman for Whole Foods followed up with an additional statement to The Huffington Post, telling the outlet: “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.”