How To Remove Sticker Residue From Produce With This Pantry Staple

If meal prepping wasn't already hard enough, this weekly task is made even more tedious thanks to pesky produce stickers. While the most versatile ingredients for meal prepping are shelf-staple grains, various sources of protein, and fresh produce, getting those hard-to-remove stickers off every fruit and vegetable is a finicky job. Luckily, you can use one food-safe pantry item to help you: peanut butter.

While there are reasons why produce stickers exist such as their ability to track inventory and improve accuracy at the checkout counter, they're useless once you leave the store. While you may need to use a scraper, spatula, or butter knife to gently remove the sticker itself from your produce, with a small dab of peanut butter, the leftover residue can also be rubbed off with ease.

Peanut butter is effective at removing sticky residue on produce because it contains a significant amount of oil. The oil breaks down the adhesive left behind in the residue in around 5-10 minutes, making it easier to wipe away.

If you like the idea of using a pantry staple but wish there was a cleaner alternative to peanut butter, you have a few options to consider. Since the oil in peanut butter is what makes this product effective, why not skip the peanuts and just use plain cooking oil? Simply cover produce stickers with a small amount of oil and then use the edge of a knife to peel the stickers off directly.

However, while this method may work, you're still left with produce covered in trace amounts of cooking oil. Since you'll need to clean your fruits and vegetables regardless, you could try a few products that are also considered to be gentle and effective cleaning agents. For example, both baking soda and white vinegar can remove stickers from fruits and vegetables along with any leftover adhesive. Interestingly, both of these products are also commonly mixed with water to remove dirt and residue from produce as well.

Whether you choose one of these alternatives, or the extra jar of peanut butter in your pantry, you have multiple household items you can use to remove the stickers from your next produce haul. Most importantly, try to be gentle when removing stickers from fruit. If your preferred method requires some rubbing or scraping, use a light touch so you don't bruise your produce or worse, break the skin.