A punnet is a small box or square basket for the gathering, transport and sale of fruit and vegetables, typically for small berries susceptible to bruising, spoiling and squashing that are therefore best kept in small rigid containers. Punnets serve also as a rough measure for a quantity of irregular sized fruits.

The word is largely confined to Commonwealth countries ^{[citation needed]} and is of uncertain origin, but is thought to be a diminutive of 'pun,' a British dialect word for pound, from the days in which such containers were used as a unit of measurement. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, parenthetically in its entry for geneticist R. C. Punnett (1875–1967), credits "a strawberry growing ancestor [who] devised the wooden basket known as a 'punnet.'"

In the late eighteenth century, strawberries and some soft fruit were sold in pottles, conical woodchip baskets (see illustration), the tapering shape being thought to reduce damage to fruit at the bottom. The pottle used in England and Scotland at that time contained nominally one Scottish pint. They were stacked, fifty or sixty together, into square hampers for transport to the market, placed upon a woman's head on a small cushion and over longer distances in a light carriage of frame work hung on springs.

The Saturday Magazine in 1834 records 'pottle baskets' being made by women and children in their homes for six pence a dozen by steeping the cut wood in water, and splitting it into strips of dimensions needed for each part of the basket. The most skilful weavers formed the upright supports of the basket, fixing them in their place by weaving the bottom part. Children wove the sides with pliable strips of fir or willow.

Pottles were replaced in the mid-1800s by the more practical rectangular punnet. The terms 'pottle' and 'punnet' were often used interchangeably. As reported in an 1879 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine, the conical pottle had given way to the punnet, being mainly manufactured in Brentford of deal, or the more preferred willow, by hundreds of women and children.

A 1852 publication lists other produce being sold in punnets in British markets, including sea kale, mushrooms, small salad and tomatoes.

Punnets are used for collecting berries as well as for selling them, thus reducing handling of the fragile fruits and the likely damage that it could cause. The process is recorded in a 1948 poem by New Zealand author Mabel Christmas-Harvey;

Knees are aching, backs are breaking
Ladies fair who eat our spoils
Have you ever 'midst enjoyment
Realised our painful toils?

Forty, fifty in a punnet,
Each one picked by hand with care,
For a penny paid each punnet...
Thus you get your dainty fare.