Perhaps you can try gsub
like below
df$FRUIT <- gsub("\s\[.*\]","",df$FRUIT)
and you will get
> df
DATE FRUIT LOCATION VALUE
1 2010-01-01 Apple USA 2
2 2010-01-01 Pinapple USA 12
Data
> dput(df)
structure(list(DATE = c("2010-01-01", "2010-01-01"), FRUIT = c("Apple [111-112, 1100, 1151-1152]",
"Pinapple [22]"), LOCATION = c("USA", "USA"), VALUE = c(2L, 12L
)), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -2L))
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