Prepackaging Fruits and Vegetables by Cooperatives

Excerpts: Selling fruits and vegetables in consumer-size packages has become increasingly common since self-help super markets came to every neighborhood shopping center. Fruit and vegetable cooperatives have naturally stepped into this field of modern merchandising to protect and increase the market for their growers' products. To find what cooperatives have been doing in this field, the Cooperative Research and Service Division of the Farm Credit Administration recently made a study as one part of a larger project being conducted under the Research and Marketing Act of 1946. Many of the findings have industry-wide significance – particularly the replies giving in considerable detail the difficulties these cooperatives have met in keeping down costs, finding satisfactory containers, and other similar problems. In outlining these problems, the cooperatives accompanied them with a number of suggested research problems that they and others in the field might attack. The study itself is based on a questionnaire to which 149 cooperatives replied.