The Meaning of Fresh
A discussion about The Meaning of Fresh has the potential to be as deep and meaningful as an attempt to solve the "what came first - the chicken or the egg?" equation. Placing Fresh within a produce context should be simple. After all, fresh - that is what we all would like our fruit & vegetables, our produce, to be. As a customer, it is something I expect in any event. I might not know how to define it, but I expect it.
Yet, the concept of freshness is one of the most debated and most misunderstood concepts within the produce industry. Does ‘fresh’ mean the apple has just been plucked from the tree? Does ‘fresh’ mean the kiwifruit has just been released from its controlled atmosphere storage facility where it has been slumbering for three months, before taking its turn on the supermarket shelf? Does ‘fresh’ mean the sweet potato or kumara has just been dug, or it was just taken from its storage pit where it had been placed 6 weeks ago to await further processing?
We have a strange relationship with ‘fresh’. Walking through an orchard and taking some cherries from a tree for immediate consumption – that is fresh. Or is it? What about if the cherries on the tree are already past their prime on the day I am walking past and pick them? Are they still ‘fresh’? Or how about apples which have been treated with a chemical compound that extends shelf life for up to a year, depending upon variety?
We may not give much thought to the freshness concept on a day to day basis, but it does influence the consumer mindset and contributes to shopping behaviour to a greater extent than we might realize.
The Meaning of Fresh from the Consumers' Perspective
The consumer associates time with the concept of ‘freshness’. Historically, time and freshness were directly correlated but now, due to advances in postharvest technology, the natural ageing process can be interfered with to give the appearance of freshness, even after long storage periods. Now ‘freshness’ is more related to quality than time, and can be maintained by using effective postharvest management. Postharvest management is all about avoiding the inevitable – ageing of the product.
The Australian Sydney Morning Herald newspaper had time on its hand to attempt defining fresh from the consumer' perspective a few years ago.. They asked Woolworths and Coles, the country's largest two supermarket chains (then and now) to share their views on the Meaning of Fresh.
Woolworths had this to say: "Food is fresh when it has not been preserved, manufactured, frozen or smoked - in essence when it remains in its natural state. Woolworths and our suppliers do not freeze fresh fruit and vegetables. Doing so would render the produce no longer fresh."
Their colleagues at Coles were a little more specific: "In terms of what we regard as the measure of freshness, our key benchmark is our customers' expectations. Customers use a range of criteria to assess fresh produce, among them being appearance, colour, smell, taste and texture. One key way to ensure fresh produce meets customer expectations is to put produce in front of customers as quickly as possible after harvest. This is particularly important for highly perishable lines such as lettuce, strawberries, grapes and berries. We are able to get these and many other lines onto our shelves within 24 hours."
Coles expanded further: "For other lines with longer ripening periods, such as bananas, avocados and kiwi fruit, the key goal is to have the product land in stores at the optimum point in their ripening process. In terms of when we believe fresh produce is longer deemed fresh or of acceptable quality, our fresh produce teams apply a very simple test. If they wouldn't buy it themselves, they don't offer it to our customers.”
A colleague of mine came to this conclusion about the fruit aspect of the produce value chain in a paper she presented at an International Society for Horticultural Science conference a few years back:
“Due to the perishable nature of fruit, time is always a constraint throughout the chain. The underlying function of the value chain is to get fresh fruit to consumers in a good quality state, so that they want to buy it.”
So, if my colleague was correct in her statement that freshness these days is quality rather than time related – and the Australian supermarket approach of letting the customer make the ultimate call by way of using their various senses at the time of purchase is the most pragmatic way to address the freshness conundrum, how can we best answer the question about the meaning of fresh?
The phrase used by the Woolworths executive in his response quoted above, about needing to "put produce in front of customers as quickly as possible after harvest", hints at the difficulties involved. These difficulties have long been understood by fresh produce supply chain participants, hence the ever more increasing focus on post-harvest management system at critical points in the value chain.