These days when we pick something up in the supermarket, it feels ok to be asking questions which a few years ago would have seemed unusual: Where was it made? What is the carbon footprint? How much do local workers get paid? What percentage of this manufacturer’s goods are organic? We’re getting more curious, and so giving companies the opportunity to impress and delight us with some answers.

Dole Organic says it invites consumers to “travel to the origin of each organic product”. By typing in a fruit sticker’s three-digit Farm Code into the company website, customers can find out about the farm on which it was made, see photos of the crops and workers, and get a sense of the story behind their banana.

According to the Dole Organic blog, one customer did this and felt moved to write to the growers at the Don Pedro Farm in Colombia to thank them for the excellent fruit. And guess what - the farmers wrote back!

Of course, it is not the first company to be experimenting with story-telling labels, but with Tesco’s carbon footprint labelling in the pipeline, and Timberland’s ‘nutrition labels’ on shoe-boxes it does seem like the big brands are starting to raise the bar with better information.