AOL News Have you ever tried making a strawberry dessert to satisfy your sweet tooth, only to end up with something disappointingly bland? It’s not you; it’s the strawberries. According to a 2021 study published in Horticulture Research (via Oxford Academic), participants said most strawberries they tasted weren’t sweet enough. This isn’t a case of underperforming strawberry farms, either — it’s all by design.
Back in 2012, Marvin Pritts, a horticulture professor from Cornell University, dropped by NPR’s “All Things Considered” podcast to explain why store-bought strawberries were getting blander. Basically, strawberries have been bred over the past few decades to enhance desirable traits, including size, yield, color, and hardiness. Flavor just so happened to be less of a priority when it came to these breeding programs, which is probably why overall sweetness ended up becoming such a huge difference between store-bought strawberries and wild ones.
Commerce plays a role, too. Store-bought strawberries often have to travel long distances to make it to local groceries, so some experts recommend helping them last longer by harvesting them while they still have white tips, before they’re fully ripe. The problem with this is the idea that strawberries continue to ripen after harvesting is one of the biggest false facts about strawberries out there. While a 1998 study in Acta Horticulturae (via Research Gate) found strawberries can sometimes get redder after picking, they also stop ripening, which means underripe strawberries don’t get any sweeter.