It is the millennial’s perennial problem: returning home after spending a small fortune on an avocado only to find the green fruit is either too squishy to slice for a salad or too hard to smash on toast.
One UK retailer, however, is claiming to have found the tech to solve the textural trouble. Tesco has begun trialling in-store avocado scanners that allow shoppers to asses how ripe the fruit is before they put it in their basket.
The UK’s biggest supermarket said the machines, which will be in five stores from this week, work like tiny X-rays to find out what the fruit looks like inside. The scanners will return one of two ripeness readings when shoppers present it with an avocado: immediately ready for smashing, or better for slicing.
The “One Third Avocado Scanner”, named after the Dutch company that invented it, promises to read the ripeness of the fruit in seconds, so shoppers can go home knowing the perfect avocado toast awaits.
Lisa Lawrence, an avocado buyer at Tesco, said the scanner would help people plan their grocery shopping better and reduce waste.
“Smashed avocado on sourdough continues to be one of the trendiest snacks at the moment, garnering millions of views on social media sites for recipe ideas, so we think, for that reason, the scanner will be really popular with shoppers,” she said.
The five Tesco stores piloting the scanner are: the Cheshunt Extra in Hertfordshire; the Colchester superstore in Essex; the Stratford-upon-Avon superstore in Warwickshire; the Wokingham superstore in Berkshire and the Salisbury Extra in Wiltshire.
Avocados have become a breakfast staple in Britain despite concerns about their carbon footprint, water usage and fears about ethical standards on farms. Tesco said it sold nearly 15m more avocados last year compared with the previous year.
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The supermarket has worked with the fruit supplier Westfalia Fruit on the avocado scanner project. Last year the companies worked together to test out the idea of etching or “tattooing” avocados as a way to reduce the millions of plastic stickers used to label them. They also introduced cardboard and paper packaging across all Tesco’s packed avocados, which Westfalia said helped save 20m pieces of plastic a year.
