How fresh is 'fresh' fruit and veg?

Tomatoes are often hard and flavourless, even if the colour is good.
Stone fruit can take up to a week to ripen, then they go bad overnight. When just bought they are rock hard and tart or tasteless. I’d like to be able to buy apricots that are ripe and ready to eat but I suppose they would be too soft to transport easily.a

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In our small Tasmanian community we have a Woolworths and a Super IGA supermarket as well as a local fresh fruit and vegetable shop. In my experience Woolworths is a clear winner in freshness in most lines, although there are some things such as new potatoes where IGA is in front. The local outlet often wins on price but they are too reluctant to discard tired items, and my priority is quality, not price

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Such a good topic, but how do you plan to fix it? I am in Gippsland Victoria, tried all the shops,no one and I mean no one, has any fresh fruit and vegetables, yesterday I got strawberries for to day they had all gone mouldy with hair on, so disgusting, we are pensioner and can’t afford to keep running back to return good.

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I find apples the worst. They rot as you eat them. They must have been in cool storage for a year or more. I expect better

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I expect the supermarket “fresh” produce to be old and worn out by too much handling.

It’s easier to say that they can handle pumpkins, potatoes and cabbages reasonably well. Anything softer or with a shorter shelf life will have to be used on the day of purchase.

Over packaged products prevent inspection.

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Stone fruit! I have not had a decent peach or nectarine from a supermarket in years. In the classic triumph of hope over experience, I buy some every year just in case they are ripe, sweet, juicy and flavoursome but they never are.

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To go through your points:

  1. No, but I can’t think of a reason why supermarkets shouldn’t sell fresh food. Just stop shipping food from one side of the continent to the other - or indeed, further.

I recently tried to buy some lemons - in a town (Perth) where people are known to put lemons on the verge for passers-by to pick up. I couldn’t buy a lemon grown in Australia, let alone WA!

  1. For some reason in WA: onions. They have the shelf life of a fruit fly.

  2. Pears are hard to judge, but that’s not new. Berries can be challenging - especially the way they’re packaged.

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Q1 That depends on whether you mean “is the fruit and veg sold through supermarket chains the same quality” or “do I think the fruit and veg sold through supermarket chains SHOULD BE the same quality”. It isn’t the same quality, but it should be. However we are so conditioned to a life of entitlement these days that we think we should be able to have what we want when we want. Strawberries in March? Sure, why not. Broccoli in April? No problem. The supermarkets will provide what they can sell, and I think we are so removed from the “real” taste of fruit and veges that no-one even knows the difference. I grow as much of my own fruit and veg as I can for my climate zone, and what I can’t grow I buy from independent grocers who stock local produce, or from organic farmer’s markets.

Q2 Fruit is always problematic, and stone fruit the most problematic these days (even in season).

Q3 I find that anything “whole” these days can be hard to judge (pawpaws, pineapples, watermelon). Smell is always the best indicator of sweetness in a lot of fruit, but even then I have been caught out when something that smells “ripe” is actually rotten inside!

Personally I think we should all try and eat only what’s in season. It makes sense from a biological perspective anyway: our bodies haven’t been designed to eat whatever it wants at any time it wants, regardless of the weather or temperature. We certainly shouldn’t be regularly eating anything that we can’t grow in Australia - such items should remain “luxury goods” for special occasions. Given how blessed we are with our range of growing conditions, I doubt there’d be too much that we can’t produce ourselves.

I also think that the public needs to be aware that a “Farmer’s Market” does not mean the produce has been produced sustainably or organically. It just means that it has skipped the middle man (the supermarket). It may still be doused in chemicals and/or pumped full of artificial fertilisers and/or genetically modified.

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very informative @pandrew3. Thank you.

We buy where & when we have to. Usually this is from the supermarket, though if we are near a fruit & vegetable market, or farmers’ market, or road side stall we will buy from there.

The big advantage of buying from the supermarkets is that if the fruit or veg is off or goes off in a couple of days, it can be returned. (We do this from time to time.)

Our experience is not to expect really ‘fresh’ fruit or veg from any of the outlets, though we have been very pleasantly surprised on rare occasions by flavoursome produce.

The most disappointing is when we have been to farm gate stalls and the produce has been poor quality, and expensive. This is more often the case than finding good quality at reasonable prices.

Fresh fruit and vegetables is a myth.

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Hello Rachel.
No I do not expect supermarket green groceries to be as fresh as at a farmer’s market. Much prefer the farmer’s market, or farmers’ roadside stalls.

My main gripe is with TOMATOES, and STONE FRUITS, where I always expect flavour and sweetness; and usually get neither.
It seems that farmers and orchardists are growing for the ability to travel well to the city markets and retailers; and totally ignoring taste and sweetness – even though these attributes are heavily used in promotions, advertising etc.
The end result is that I buy far fewer of these items than I would if they had great flavour and sweetness.

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My next door neighbour worked for a company that supplied the supermarkets with salad vegetables: cucumber, tomatoes,capsicums, and the like. If this product was not picked up by the supermarkets at the markets, it would start earning frequent flyer points by going to Darwin and the NT and various country areas where fresh veggies are not easily recognised. Since it was never picked ripe it had a certain survival rate and could end up back home where it would be picked up to be sold at a sunday market, and you could probably still play tennis with the tomatoes and not get a red shower.
Fresh is a joke, so is unbruised, and the “odd” bunch that Woolies sell are often more expensive and less fresh than the same 1st(?) grade product in their store. Though I have to admit, the veggies I see locally would be the rejects from the wealthier suburbs where customers are generally not as easy to fool; most people around where I live would not recognise a vegetable or piece of fruit that wasn’t either frozen, canned or deep fried.

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Most ‘out of season’ fruit sold in supermarkets.
They go brown on the inside after a few days, as they’ve been picked just prior to ripening and kept in cold storage.
Toughest one to judge are Avocados. We honestly chuck out almost half of what we buy. So it is a very rare purchase, especially at those supermarket prices.

The growers market for me any day for FRESH fruit & veg.

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I once did expect supermarkets to sell reasonably fresh produce, but I’ve since learned that thanks to their use of cool and cold rooms, produce can be several years old when it hits the shelves. I expect growers markets to sell the freshest produce as they generally can’t afford the kind of strict temperature control that supermarket chains can, and independent grocers to fall somewhere in the middle ground. You also missed the many local food hubs and produce shares, which are more and more becoming a valid source of fresh produce.

When you ask about particular fruits and vegetables, you don’t specify if you mean supermarket, IG, or farmers market / farmer direct. In supermarkets, all produce seems to be disappointing at particular times of the year, in IGs that happens with items like onions some of the time, and at FM/FD they just aren’t available all year round unless in season so they’re generally always good when available. Also, comparatively, supermarkets have the most uniform but bland produce, IGs have a more flavourful but variable range, and FM/FD has the most variability but is generally the best, and the produce lasts best of the three.

Supermarket fruit and vegetables are bought from the grower at a less ripe stage and that allows them to be retarded for years, but misses out on delivering the full flavours and nutrients as many of these aren’t developed until full ripeness, and what little is there to begin with, is consumed by the produce during storage to bring it to ripeness.

Quality/ripeness/freshness issue: As above. How can anything that isn’t allowed to ripen on the plant absorb all the extra nutrients that it would have gotten with another week or two on the plant? And how can this unripe produce then become “ripe” without any further nutrients? Obviously that produce is going to need to consume part of its own nutrients to complete the ripening process, nutrients that in a normal (IG, FM/FD) setting it would have obtained from the parent plant?

In general, the nutrient density of supermarket produce is uniform, but lower than real fresh produce. Because some supermarket produce is kept for long periods, some deterioration occurs and when you take that produce home, it spoils far more quickly than fresh produce.

Oh - also look into meat storage, and age at time of sale. Supermarkets apparently can, under strict temperature control conditions, buy meat at today’s prices, freeze it for years (up to thirty was a figure I’ve often come across) and then sell it at future prices in the future. Even now some meat can probably be several years old before it hits the meat section styrofoam. Okay, this is mostly hearsay, but there’s been a well-documented case in China of forty(!!!) year old meat still being sold, often transported without refrigeration, and if they with lmited refrigeration and temperature control can keep meat for forty years then you might reasonably suspect that supermarket chains have been doing much the same but with far better technology…

That’s about all I can put into a brief comment, hope it helps.

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These look delicious!

When visiting my parents over Christmas, I met a woman down the road from their place with a large garden like yours. She was selling boxes of cherries from her front door, much better quality (and price) than from the supermarket. I wish I could find another home-gardener to buy fruit from near my house!

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“Picked on” stickers. :slight_smile:

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Good one. Yes, I’m sick and tired of the fatuous rubbish in commercials about the supposedly “fresh” fruit sold by the big supermarket chains. I cannot buy decent stone fruit. Peaches, nectarines and plums are more suitable as ammunition than for consumption. Rock hard and tasteless.

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hi @bente.jobsz, at this stage I’m just wanting to get a good understanding of what people feel are the main problems. But there have been some great comments, and even a few suggested fixes, in the thread - thanks everyone! - so we certainly have a lot of different avenues and options to potentially investigate.

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Ever since Woolies started advertising themselves as “The Fresh Food People”, I’m afraid their fruit and veg has been declining in quality and variety, while prices have increased.

Unfortunately, the independant fresh fruit and veg vendor in our local shopping centre has left and we are now stuck with Coles or Woolworths. Neither provide local produce from what I can see.

My wife bought some kiwi fruit at Christmas and they were hard and not yet ripe. Grapes are now pre-packed and priced at $8-10 kilogram many are squashed and starting to mould.

Nah! I don’t buy from them any more. Most fruit and veg are picked far to early, have little taste or are starting to turn.

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I like to buy what is in season too. This summer in Perth the apricots, peaches and nectarines have been delicious. I only buy a few at a time and I like then to be ripe or almost ripe when I buy them. The cherries are great at present. Strawberries if I buy a 500 gram punnet of them after cutting all the bruised bit off I’m lucky to have 200 grams.I buy from a greengrocer not usually a supermarket.

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