Today, I set out to solve one of the great mysteries of our time. That’s right, today I dare to ask the question: How the hell do we make it easy to choose an avocado?
Before you start telling me about X, Y, and Z method, I’d like to assure you that I’ve tried them all. The button trick, the foil trick, the squeeze and roll… you get the picture. And at certain times in my life, these tricks lulled me into a false sense of security about my avocado selection prowess. But without fail, something eventually goes wrong. As delightful an experience as eating an avocado is, choosing the right avocado is certainly not.
There’s something to be said about user interfaces (yes, I use the term here very loosely) that make you feel like you have some inside knowledge. For example, a well-designed mobile interface that requires no instructions can make users feel like power-users, and enhance their experience with the product. In this sense, millions of years of evolutions have failed the avocado.
I know you know what I’m talking about. It feels like no matter what you do, you are playing a game of chance.
On a more serious note, the difficulty we face when choosing avocados has some pretty heavy implications:
- From personal experience, I know that a lot of avocados go to waste because of poor judgement about when to eat them. At least my avocados do.
- It takes an average of 74 gallons of water to grow one pound of avocados in California. (source) California is currently in a drought. If wasting food isn’t bad enough already, there’s the environment to consider.
Such a common problem calls for an elegant, affordable solution.
A Chemistry Thought Experiment
When I first starting thinking about this problem, the first thing that came to mind was my introductory Biology class. In the lecture on growth and ripening, we discussed a chemical called ethylene (C2H4) that some fruits naturally emit when they ripen. Some fruit companies use ethylene to artificially ripen fruit on their own schedule.
So I thought: What if there’s a way to indicate how much ethylene an avocado has emitted? Would this be a reliable indicator of ripeness?
In this imaginary scenario, I picture a sticker with 5 strips of some compound that reacts with ethylene to induce a color change. Each strip would contain the compound in increasing concentrations, or decreasing concentrations of a different compound that preferentially binds ethylene, such that as the concentration of ethylene in the sticker increases, more of the strips change color.
Of course, there are two main pitfalls to this plan: I do not know of a compound or compounds that can do this without posing a risk to the health of the avocado consumer, and the chances of such a compound being affordable for fruit companies is pretty low.
A Much Simpler Solution
The most obvious change in an avocado’s detectable characteristics as it ripens is the color of the skin. It follows that someone who is good at choosing avocados takes skin color into consideration, and those without strong knowledge of appropriate avocado colors are more likely to choose an unripe or overripe fruit.
Placing a sticker the color of a perfectly ripe avocado on the outside of the avocado would be a really cost-effective way for fruit companies to make sure their produce isn’t wasted. For visibility, I showed stickers with a white outline in the illustration below:
I’ve had to Google the color of a ripe avocado too many times. This would be such an easy solution to that problem and would clear up at least some of the mystery about avocado ripeness.
Back to Chemistry… Sort Of
Once I mocked up the ripeness sticker, I realized there was potential for the stickers to be even more informative. I was inspired by the color guides on the sides of pH tape dispensers. Once you’ve dipped a strip of Litmus paper into a solution, it takes a few seconds to compare the color of the strip to the legend on the side. I personally find this design pretty brilliant, especially since it’s so simple in retrospect. Instead of pH, I wanted a sticker that gave similar information to what the ethylene sticker would give. The new sticker tells you what color the avocado will be at different stages of the ripening process so that you can anticipate when you will be eating it.
On further thought, I realized that having colors without any indication of what they represent may not be very meaningful. To mitigate this issue, I added a simple labeling scheme to each band on the sticker: 4 and 2 for 4 and 2 days until ripe, RIPE for the ripe color, and X for an over-ripe color.
Concluding Thoughts
As with all design solutions, there are limitations to the avocado sticker, the first being that color is not the only indicator of ripeness for an avocado. An important test of ripeness is the firmness of the avocado, which no sticker can tell you (at least to my knowledge.) Funnily enough, there is a patent out there for a device that attempts to solve this problem. Another problem with the sticker is that it doesn’t account for the fact that avocados can vary in color across their surface. Although the sticker would certainly be helpful, it would probably still require a fair amount of discretion from the user.
So as much as I’d like to throw my hands in the air and say, “I’ve done it, I’ve solved the avocado,” it appears there is a long way to go to unraveling this king of nature’s mysteries. But I feel comfortable saying the solution I’ve offered is a pretty big step in the direction of making avocado purchasing and selecting an easy experience.
[4/100]
