Nicer bites

The US produce industry is working with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) to make sure that fruits and vegetables taste as good as they look.

They're counting on machine vision tools that can predict the quality of fruit or vegetable flavour - right after picking and in the packing plant - without ever touching the product.

Today, batches of fruits and vegetables are judged by sample tastings, but there's no guarantee that all of the produce in the batch will taste the same. Samples are also tested for firmness by mechanically stabbing them with a thick, steel probe. With both methods, the tested produce has to be thrown away.

While there are machine vision tools that can check skin-deep traits like size, colour and bruising, it is difficult to judge deep, internal qualities like taste and texture of apples and many other fruits.

Now Renfu Lu, an agricultural engineer with the ARS Sugar Beet and Bean Research Unit in East Lansing, MI, has developed machine vision prototypes that "taste" every single piece of produce from right after harvest to when it passes by on the packing line.