The Plan

We decided to investigate how far various items of fruit had travelled from their source to the supermarket in Winchester City Centre. The things we wanted to investigate were:

• How far the following fruits had travelled: bananas, apples, strawberries, melons, pineapples and grapes.
• Which shop's fruit has less food miles?
• Which fruit comes from furthest away?
• How much organic and fairtrade produce the shops sold?

To do this we went into various shops around Winchester City Centre and found out where the fruit had come from and then later worked out how far it had travelled.

M&S

Our first visit was the food section of Marks and Spencer. We discovered here that all the fruit came from a fair distance away, with Egypt being the closest source country. As the graph below shows that means that all the fruit we investigated has travelled over 2000 miles.

Sainsbury's

Next we went to Sainsbury's, and compared the different fruit again. We noticed that the fruit was generally from more local places such as apples from Kent and strawberries from Spain. As suspected bananas were further away because obviously they need to be grown in hotter climates.

Iceland

We next visited Iceland's where we discovered similar results to Sainsbury's. Grapes and bananas came from South Africa and Dominican Republic respectively, like Sainsbury's. Whereas apples came from Italy rather than Kent therefore travelled a bit further.

Holland and Barrett

Next we went to Holland and Barrett. In this shop we noticed that they did not have fresh fruit but instead had dried fruit. This was very interesting as we noticed that all the fruit came from different countries compared to the fresh fruit. For example dry bananas came from Vietnam whereas fresh fruit came from the Dominican Republic.

Conclusion

Overall we discovered the following:

• In most cases the same type of fruit came from the same place in different shops like bananas being from the Dominican Republic and Strawberries coming from Spain.
• However there was some slight differences between stores, for example Sainsbury's apples came from Kent, within the UK, whilst Iceland's apples came all the way from Italy.
• Most shops had fairtrade bananas but there were few other fruits that were fairtrade. M&S had the most fairtrade fruit whilst Iceland had the least.

• All of M&S' fruit was organic whilst much less of the supermarket's fruit was.

If we were to repeat this enquiry we would expand our area of investigation so that we could use larger stores with more variety. To do this we would have required more time and alternative transportation.