Where Does Fruit Get Its Flavor?

Did you get a sumptuous fruit gift this season? Fabulous fruit is wonderful – nutritious, low in calories, easy to eat, and – best of all – delicious! But where do the assorted fruits get their amazing flavor?

There’s nothing more disappointing than finding a perfect apple, orange or pear at the grocery store — beautiful in color, no bruises, perfect texture – and then tasting it and finding it’s dry, mushy, or tasteless. It happens all too often, which is why many discerning consumers prefer to buy fruits online from reputable fruit sellers like Hale Groves. When you order fruits from Hale Groves, you know you’re receiving the most flavorful fruit possible. But how do we know our fresh fruit boxes will contain the tastiest fruit before we send them to you? (We’ll come back to that in a minute.)

What Makes Fruit So Fabulous

One of the most appealing things about fruit flavor is its sweetness. Even the tangiest fruits contain fructose, a natural sugar that gives fruit it’s amazing flavor – the more fructose, the sweeter the fruit.

Unlike vegetables, fruits have seeds, and before human beings cultivated fruits, fruit plants depended on animals to spread those seeds in order to keep the plants going. High levels of fructose created sweet fruits that tempted wild animals to eat them, then carry away in their stomachs to deposit elsewhere, sowing the fruit far and wide. (This also kept a new fruit plant from competing with its parent plant for sun, soil nutrients, and water.)

In addition to fructose, fruit also contains a chemical called amylase, which breaks down starches in the fruit’s flesh into sugar. That’s how fruit ripens. The longer some fruits are left on the tree (like citrus fruits) the sweeter it becomes. We at Hale Groves always leave out citrus fruits on the tree as long as possible, so your fruit gifts of oranges, grapefruit and tangerines always taste perfect!

Fun fact: amylase also makes fruit easier to digest.

Aroma Adds to Fruity Flavor

We tend to think of sugar when it comes sweetness…in other words, if an orange tastes sweet, it’s because of the sugars it contains hit the sweet receptors in your taste buds, right? But it turns out that the aroma of certain foods has an influence on how sweet we perceive that food to be.

Smell and taste are closely linked. The taste buds of the tongue identify taste, and the nerves in the nose identify smell. Both sensations are communicated to the brain, which integrates the information so that flavors can be recognized and appreciated. The volatile compounds in different types of fruit intensify as the fruit ripens, influencing the smell of the fruit and adding to our perceived sweetness of it when we taste it.

How Sweet it Is!

All of this is good news when you for those who buy fruit boxes from Hale Groves, because we not only check each piece of fruit we grow by hand to make sure it looks fresh and perfect – we leave it on the tree long enough to know that it is fresh and perfect! That’s quality you can count on (and taste!).

Enjoy!

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What Are the Benefits of Juicing Fruits/Citrus?
What Does a California Grapefruit Taste Like?
8 Reasons Why Fruit Should be a Regular Part of Your Diet
4 Fun Facts About Grapefruit