Wild fruit is collected from uncultivated land through a collection network. Cultivated fruit comes off a managed field with a known variety and a spray diary. Five practical differences follow.
Size and uniformity. Wild fruit sizes smaller and spreads wider across the distribution. That is a property of the material, not a defect, and judging a wild lot against a plantation size band is the most common source of dispute in the category.
Extraneous vegetable matter. Collection brings leaf, stem, moss and occasional wood into the stream. A wild specification needs an explicit percentage tolerance plus a separate and much tighter limit for hard foreign matter.
Residues. The intuition runs the wrong way. Regulation (EC) No 396/2005 applies to the commodity as traded regardless of how it grew, and wild fruit can pick up residues from spray drift and soil persistence. The difference is that there is no spray diary to explain the result, so testing carries the whole burden.
Certification. Regulation (EU) 2018/848 provides for wild collection as an organic activity, but the certified unit is a mapped collection area with a sustainable yield ceiling rather than a farm with a planted hectarage.
Volume. A plantation gives a number; a forest gives a forecast. Wild yields move by a factor of two or more between adjacent seasons and collectors move between commodities. Contract a base volume plus a priced option layer rather than a flat annual commitment.
One labelling point: there is no reserved legal definition of wild for most fruit, so the claim is governed by the general fair information rules in Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011. Blends of wild and cultivated fruit described as wild are exactly the kind of statement that attracts enforcement attention.