Good Question: How Fresh Is Corn When It Gets To Stores?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- It's a staple of summer barbeques and the State Fair -- delicious Minnesota corn. Most of it is grown at farms less than an hour away from the Cities. So, how fresh it is when it gets to stores? Good Question.
There are five or six large corn growers in the metro area. They generally pick their corn between mid-to-late July through mid-September. Any corn in grocery stores or farmer's markets before then likely came from places like Indiana, Georgia or Florida, according to Adam Gamble with Russ Davis Wholesale, a wholesale grocer who provides corn to much of the Upper Midwest.
Gamble says some corn growers deliver directly to stores from the farm and others deliver to a wholesaler, who then bring the produce to the stores. Lunds & Bylerlys and Kowalski's say they often have to corn in their stores 24 hours after it's picked. A spokesman for Cub Foods says, in most cases, the corn gets from farm to store in less than 48 hours.
"If the farmers bring it right to the market, it could be hours," says Eric Nathe of Riverside Farms in Elk River. "At the oldest, maybe it's going to be two days."
At Riverside, they usually start picking corn just after 6am. By late morning, it's in the cooler for at least a few hours. Later that day or the next morning, Nathe says it's on a truck headed for stores or wholesalers.
"With as busy as we've been, we're picking it today, and shipping it out tomorrow," says Nathe. "Sometimes we're picking it and on the road in the same day, but I don't like to do that. I like getting the heat out to seal in the freshness."
Gamble says corn is not a unique case when it comes to summer crops in Minnesota. During the summer, local crops like peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, watermelon and cantaloupes have a similar turnaround time.