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Produce guide

Why are supermarket apples mealy, and how do you pick a good one?

By RIPE, checked against a produce manager's cues. Published .

Because that apple may be many months old. Apples are held in controlled atmosphere storage, sometimes close to a year, which is how they are on the shelf every week of the year. That is normal rather than scandalous, but it means an apple only ever softens from the day it was picked. It never improves.

What to check

Feelfirm with no give at all under thumb pressure. Any softness in an apple is age, and it is exactly what mealy feels like from the outside.
Feelheavy for its size. A light apple has lost water.
Lookunbroken skin, no bruises or punctures. Skip the gloss, which is the wax coating rather than a freshness signal.
Notevariety does more work than anything you can see. Some varieties are bred to hold their texture in long storage and some go soft quickly, so if supermarket apples keep disappointing you, changing variety will do more than changing how you choose within one bin.
Common mistakestoring apples on the counter in a fruit bowl with everything else. Apples are strong ethylene producers, so they ripen the fruit around them and soften themselves faster in the warm. Apples keep far better in the fridge, and they should sit away from your greens.

Written by the team behind RIPE, a free app that reads a photo of the whole produce pile and rings the ripest ones. Every cue above is one you can check with your own hands, and it all works with no app at all.

People also ask

Should you refrigerate tomatoes?

Not until they are fully ripe. Full answer

How do you keep bananas from ripening too fast?

Separate them from other fruit, keep them cool but not refrigerated until they are as ripe as you like, and then refrigerate to hold them. Full answer

Why are my tomatoes mealy?

Mealy tomatoes come from cold and from being picked green. Full answer

Or just show us the one in your hand

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The whole bin, in one photo.

You just read the cue for one piece. RIPE reads a photo of the entire display, draws numbered rings on the ones worth taking, and tells you why in the same plain words these guides use. Then it remembers what you brought home and nudges you before it turns.

It claims only what a camera can actually see. Every verdict ends by handing the last check back to your hands, which is the part these guides just taught you.

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Keep going

How can you tell if a watermelon is ripe?→ How do you pick a ripe cantaloupe?→ How can you tell if an avocado is ripe?→ How do you ripen an avocado quickly?→
All 45 produce guides