Fruits and vegetables are being eaten date back to primordial times, ultimately merging with farming, abandoning hunting and gathering.Fruits and vegetables are rich in various important micronutrients for example, vitamin A and C, folic acid, carotenoids, polyphenols, anthocyanins, and antioxidants, and are used in ancient Ayurvedic medical systems to treat different illnesses and ailments (Liguori et al., 2018).Raw fruits and vegetables have high water content and are perishable. They have a wide range of bacteria including spores on their exterior surface (Rawat, 2015). If contaminated water is used for rinsing/ cleaning them, it will add food-borne illness-inducing pathogens to the fresh produce (Kamarudin et al., 2018). Not only water, but also other known and unknown sources add Pseudomonas, Erwinia, Lactobacillus, Staphylococcus, Bacillus cereus, as well as viruses such as Hepatitis A Virus, Rotavirus, and Norwalk disease viruses that can be transmitted to the humans by consumption of raw fruits and vegetables (Miranda & Schaffner, 2019).Mostly, the outbreak in fruits and vegetables is associated with Cryptosporidium (20.5%), Salmonella (52.2%), and Norovirus (54.3%) in Europe and North America. Apart from this, vegetables are also observed to undergo outbreaks in Europe and North America at frequencies of 34.1% and 47.4%, respectively. Moreover, Aiyedun et al. ( 2021) reported 277 foodborne outbreaks in the American continent from 1999 to 2019.
