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Do you know where it comes from and how long it has been in store?

This is not about food from abroad being bad. It is about almost nobody telling you the journey or the time, and without those two facts you do not know what you are buying.

The origin is declared. The date is not

Fresh fruit or vegetables sold to the public have to carry their country of origin: the EU's general marketing standard, Implementing Regulation (EU) 543/2011, requires it. That is all the label owes you. It does not owe you the day it was lifted, nor the months it has spent in a cold store, nor how many hands it has passed through. «Origin: Spain» and «picked the day before yesterday» are not the same sentence, and on the shelf they read the same.

January's onion is not from January

Between January and March 2026 Spain imported 71,032.70 tonnes of onions, 30 % more than the 54,363.35 of the same quarter in 2025. The leading supplier was Peru, with 25,834.40 tonnes, ahead of the Netherlands (14,741.14), Chile (10,323.83) and South Africa (6,825.75). These are foreign trade figures from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Enterprise (DataComex).

The other half of that winter onion is from here, but it is not new either: a pungent onion keeps six to nine months at 0 °C and 65-70 % humidity, according to the post-harvest sheets of the University of California (Davis). So the same February box may be an onion that crossed the Atlantic three weeks ago or one that came out of the ground in July and has slept ever since. Nobody tells you which.

What exactly a controlled atmosphere is

Harvested fruit is still alive and still breathing. A controlled atmosphere store lowers its air: the normal oxygen of air, 21 %, is cut to 1-3 % by flooding the room with nitrogen, and carbon dioxide is held below 3 % at the start of storage. With less oxygen it breathes less and ages more slowly. The agricultural extension of the University of Maine sums it up without ceremony: it is the technique for fruit that is going to be sold four months or more after harvest.

It is not a dirty trick. It is the reason there are apples in June and half the crop is not thrown away. But it is information: a controlled atmosphere apple is a sound old apple, and you ought to be able to know which of the two you are paying for.

And a market almost everything passes through

In Barcelona that point is called Mercabarna. Its central fruit and vegetable market moves more than 2,100,000 tonnes a year across some 250 businesses, over more than 170,000 m² in seven halls, and it is Europe's leading market for fruit and vegetable trading. There is an equivalent in every large city.

There is nothing wrong with it existing: without that platform a city of millions does not eat. What it has is an effect: between the field and your bag there is a stretch of warehouse, cold store and lorry that nobody counts when they say «fresh».

The treatments that exist, and the only one the law tells you about

An onion reaching March without sprouting is rarely luck. Maleic hydrazide is a growth regulator approved in the EU — its approval was renewed by Regulation (EU) 2017/1506 — and its assessed uses are precisely the suppression of sprouting in onion, shallot, garlic, carrot and potato. It is applied in the field, before lifting.

After harvest the list changes, and it changes with the years too. Chlorpropham (CIPC) was used for decades against sprouting in stored potatoes: the EU did not renew its approval (Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/989) and Member States withdrew authorisations from January 2020. Ethylene is the opposite of a preservative: the banana is cut green and ripened in a room with 100-150 ppm of ethylene for 24-48 hours at 15-20 °C. And 1-MCP does exactly the reverse: it blocks the fruit's perception of ethylene so that it does not ripen while it waits.

Of all of this, the only thing the law obliges you to be able to read on the packaging is on citrus: preservatives and other chemical substances applied after harvest are declared, under Annex I of that same Regulation 543/2011, and the Court of Justice of the EU confirmed it in 2016 (case C-26/15 P). For the rest of the counter that sentence does not exist.

Where this house stands

We are not saying importing is wrong, nor that storing is wrong. A well-run cold store keeps food and holds up the price for whoever grows it. What we are saying is shorter: it is not that it is wrong, it is that it is done wrong some of the time, and the way to know which of the two you have got is for the route to be written down. Where it came from, when it was picked, how it has been kept and what has been applied to it.

We are not going to certify anybody here and we are not going to point the finger at anybody. We are going to explain how the chain works and leave you one step from the only door where those four questions get an answer the same day you ask them: the farm. 103 farms on this list publish their phone number, and what to ask is written out for you.

Carry on here

Sources: Implementing Regulation (EU) 543/2011 — marketing standards for fruit and vegetables (2026-08-12) · Onion foreign trade, January-March 2026 (DataComex, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Enterprise) (in Spanish) (2026-06-17) · UC Davis Postharvest Center — Onions (Dry): 0 °C, 65-70 % RH, 6-9 months (2026-08-12) · University of Maine Cooperative Extension — Controlled Atmosphere Storage (2026-08-12) · Mercabarna — Central Fruit and Vegetable Market (in Spanish) (2026-08-12) · EFSA — peer review of maleic hydrazide (approval renewed by Regulation (EU) 2017/1506) (2026-08-12) · Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/989 — non-renewal of chlorpropham (CIPC) (2026-08-12) · UC Davis Postharvest Center — Banana (Cavendish): 100-150 ppm ethylene, 24-48 h (2026-08-12)

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