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Select an apple from a bin at the grocery store, and it probably looks fresh on the outside if there are no marks or bruises. Despite its appearance, the apple could be 10 months old and lacking nutrients. No amount of squeezing, sniffing or scratching at the peel will show you the nutritional value, such as how much vitamin C is inside.
TeakOrigin, a food data company based in Boston, is trying to make it easier to determine the nutritional value of your food before you buy it. The company has released its TeakOrigin Guide to help consumers make better produce choices. The guide shows the nutrients, quality and value of top-selling fruits and vegetables in retail stores located in Boston and Los Angeles.
Unless you have expensive laboratory equipment at home, it is impossible to measure all the nutrients inside the apple you bought from the grocery store. TeakOrigin uses analytical chemistry, optical spectroscopy and machine learning to analyze produce. The company gathers thousands of samples from top grocers and ranks them based on quality, value and perception.
For example, the TeakOrigin Guide shows how the nutrients in a Gala apple from Walmart in Boston compare to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) standard or scientific literature. The apple received a high score in vitamin C with more of this important nutrient than the USDA's value. So it has a score of 130% for vitamin C.
Greg Shewmaker, cofounder and chief commercial officer at TeakOrigin, pointed out that most people assume their produce is fresh and nutritious, especially if they paid a premium for it, but they have no way of determining if this is accurate.
"As consumers, we have come to believe that selecting the prettiest organic apple or the fattest, most perfectly-round blueberries, from the best stores, equates to maximum benefits. Our insights suggest that’s just not true. Shoppers at mass retailers and discounters are getting really good quality food, often times better than the more expensive grocers. Price doesn’t always equal quality," Shewmaker said.
Consumers are not the only ones who lack basic information about the food they eat every day. Top retailers and grocery stores do not test their produce to determine the nutritional value, so they have no way of passing this data on to the shoppers.
Apple orchard.
"The most surprising thing to me is that today with all our scientific advances, billions invested in innovation and trillions of dollars in transactions across the global food supply chain each year, we still can't answer the most basic questions about the food we grow, sell or eat. We learned that these companies, no matter how big or how passionate about their products and practices, have no more of a clue about what they’re selling or buying than we do about what we’re eating," Shewmaker said.
In the process of putting together the guide, TeakOrigin discovered that it is not automatic for a premium retail brand to sell the highest quality foods or that a discounter only sells poor quality produce. Shewmaker explained that most of the produce comes from a handful of the same places, which means it is grown by a lot of the same people and companies, using the same basic practices.
"We’ve picked beautiful Honeycrisp apples right from the trees in Vermont and had them in our lab three hours later for testing. Some of these fresh-picked apples had zero Vitamin C. Other times we would grab a free Red Delicious from the hotel lobby and eventually get it back to the lab for analysis. It might have easily been last season’s apple. But you know what, it still had some measurable Vitamin C and other key nutrients that made it a decent find," Shewmaker said.
TeakOrigin hopes its guide will help you understand what is inside your produce, so you can make choices that are better informed. The company plans to expand the free guide in the future to include more locations and foods.
