Produce refers to fresh fruits and vegetables, including some items you might not immediately think of, like mushrooms, herbs, nuts, and sprouts. The term covers any plant-based food (and a few non-plant foods) sold in its raw or near-raw state for direct consumption. While the everyday meaning is straightforward, the boundaries get interesting once you look at what regulators, grocery stores, and botanists each include.
The Official Definition
The FDA’s Produce Safety Rule defines produce as any fruit or vegetable, and explicitly includes mushrooms, sprouts, peanuts, tree nuts, and herbs. The USDA uses a related term, “perishable agricultural commodity,” which covers fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables specifically.
What’s excluded matters just as much. Food grains, meaning small, hard seeds primarily grown for flour, cereal, baked goods, or oils, are not considered produce. That list includes wheat, oats, rye, barley, sorghum, quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, and oilseeds like soybeans, flax seed, cotton seed, and sunflower seed. So while a peanut counts as produce, a soybean does not, because soybeans are overwhelmingly processed into oil and meal rather than eaten directly.
Fruits, Vegetables, and the Botanical Gray Area
In a grocery store, the produce section splits neatly into fruits and vegetables. Botany tells a different story. A botanical fruit is any structure that develops from a flower and contains seeds. By that definition, tomatoes, avocados, cucumbers, peppers, pumpkins, zucchini, eggplant, olives, corn kernels, and even green peas are all fruits. We call them vegetables because of how we cook and eat them, not because of what they are biologically.
This distinction rarely matters in daily life, but it does explain why you’ll see tomatoes shelved with vegetables in the produce aisle and with fruits in a botany textbook. For practical purposes, if it’s sold fresh and you eat it as a plant-based food, it’s produce regardless of which botanical category it falls into.
Items You Might Not Expect
Several foods that seem like they belong in other aisles are officially classified as produce:
- Mushrooms are not plants at all. They’re fungi. But they’re regulated, sold, and nutritionally grouped as vegetables. They contain a compound similar in structure to cholesterol found in animals, and their savory flavor comes from the same amino acid found in meat, fish, and aged cheese.
- Fresh herbs like basil, cilantro, parsley, rosemary, thyme, dill, mint, oregano, sage, and tarragon all count as produce when sold fresh. The FDA treats them as raw agricultural commodities, the same category as any fresh fruit or vegetable. Dried herbs, on the other hand, have been processed and are typically sold as spices, not produce.
- Nuts and peanuts fall under the produce umbrella in food safety regulations. The FDA’s Produce Safety Rule specifically names peanuts, pecans, cashews, and hazelnuts.
- Sprouts are included as produce, though they carry their own set of food safety rules because of how they’re grown.
When Produce Stops Being “Produce”
The USDA defines a processed food as any raw agricultural commodity that has undergone changes to its natural state. That includes cutting, chopping, cooking, canning, freezing, drying, dehydrating, milling, or pasteurizing. By this standard, a whole apple is produce, but applesauce is a processed food.
In practice, the line is blurry. Washed salad greens, peeled baby carrots, and bagged pre-cut fruit have all been physically altered, yet most people still think of them as produce. Regulatory agencies generally treat minimal processing (washing, refrigerating, removing inedible parts, and even freezing) differently from more intensive processing like cooking or canning. Frozen fruits and vegetables are still covered under the USDA’s perishable agricultural commodity definition, so frozen peas at the store are technically still produce even though they’ve been blanched and frozen.
Peeling is worth noting separately. Removing outer layers of fruits and vegetables strips away fiber and plant nutrients, which is one reason why nutrition guidelines often recommend eating skins when possible.
How Storage Life Varies Across Produce
One defining feature of produce is that it’s perishable, but the range is enormous. Leafy greens like lettuce and spinach last 10 to 14 days under ideal cold storage. Root vegetables are far hardier: topped beets keep for four to six months, mature carrots last seven to nine months, and late-crop potatoes can store for five to ten months at the right temperature and humidity. Rutabagas and turnips fall in the four to six month range.
This variation explains why root vegetables and tubers were historically staple foods through winter, while leafy greens were seasonal. It also explains the layout of many produce departments, where hardier items like potatoes, onions, and squash sit at room temperature while greens and berries are refrigerated.
Items the FDA Considers “Rarely Consumed Raw”
The FDA maintains a specific list of produce that people rarely eat raw. These items are still produce, but they’re exempt from certain growing and handling safety rules because cooking eliminates most contamination risks. The list includes potatoes, sweet potatoes, dried beans (black, kidney, lima, navy, pinto, and great Northern), eggplant, pumpkin, winter squash, sweet corn, okra, lentils, chickpeas, coffee beans, cocoa beans, and several nuts including cashews, hazelnuts, peanuts, and pecans. Sour cherries, cranberries, dates, and figs also make the list.
Some of these might surprise you. Eggplant and pumpkin are obviously cooked before eating, but cranberries and dates feel like they could go either way. The classification reflects how the majority of consumers actually use these foods, not whether eating them raw is possible.