There are some initiatives going on in Canada at the moment—for obvious reasons, I don't want to mention names—for diverting to processing products that aren't suitable for going to retail stores. One of the challenges, though, is that our food industry is so complex that it's often not feasible to take product from one supply chain and move it over, say, from the fresh supply chain into the processing supply chain.
I'm not in favour of more regulation. What I am in favour of is clever regulation. I think clever regulation could actually help businesses manage some of that better. We've done a number of studies in the past that show—and I've heard it said by a number of retailers—you only need one or two pieces of fruit in an entire display that are of poor quality to actually discourage consumers from buying that fruit. But if you purposely mark a product as “second grade“, and yes, if you discount it as well and sell it at a lower price, it can be very effective.
Just for starters, Tesco and Sainsbury's are just two of the retailers in the U.K. that come to mind and have done this quite successfully. Shop 'n Save in the U.S. saves $100 million annually, and part of that is by better managing produce in terms of discounting or actually marketing something as ugly, when it's not class one.