No need for whipped cream, our berries are sweet as is! 🍧

Last week, we gave you the recipe to determine (with science) the perfect strawberry. How? By analyzing its nutritional value. Now, we’re going to get to a question that lots of you have asked: “What’s the deal with the sugar?” PF (a.k.a., Dr. Pluchon), our biology expert, is back to tell you all about it.

• #1 — The (secret) recipe for the perfect strawberry 🍓
• #2 — No need for whipped cream, our berries are sweet as is! 🍧
• #3 — Inside our berries? A shot of vitamins! 💪

When the next person asks you about the perfect strawberry…

The strawberry and the sugar 🍓

We talked in our last article about how sugar levels in strawberries are generally rather high (and particularly high in ours). Is that why the strawberry is one of the most popular fruits in all of France? It’s highly likely. Let’s get into it.

All the different sugars

Sugars are the principle source of energy found in strawberries (and in fruits and vegetables more generally). We can put them into 2 categories:

• Major sugars: glucose, sucrose, and fructose.
• Secondary sugars: lactose, maltose, raffinose, stachyose, verbascose, and a bunch of other words that end in -ose. These are less well-known, simply because they are less present than the others.

Sugars develop directly in the plant’s leaves as they’re exposed to light. The carbon in carbon dioxide (CO2) is fixed to a sugar precursor and the remaining oxygen is released into the air. This is photosynthesis. For those of you who like diagrams, the scientific formula looks like this:

Once produced in the leaves, the sugars are transported through the plant’s connective tissues (the stems) toward its various organs (roots, budding leaves, flowers, fruits). When the flower transforms itself into fruit (“the fruiting”), the majority of the sugars is directed into the fruits. They supply the energy needed for the fruits’ growth.

A peek inside our Cooltainer

Measuring sugar levels 📏

There are 2 methods to measure the sugars within fruits:

• The Brix Index gives a global view of the sugar within a fruit. It is expressed in degrees related to a percentage, and it’s usually somewhere between 6–12o for strawberries.
• The sugar breakdown gives a measurement for each sugar separately. This analysis is much more precise but also much more complex.

The Brix Index

The Brix Index has come to be the key reference in estimating the amount of sugar contained in fruits. Measuring it is fast and cheap and there are now portable refractometers that can measure Brix degrees no matter where you are. How does it work? Just crush the fruit and analyze the juice.

A refractometer

Sugars that are more or less sugary

We think about all sugars as having the same caloric value, but they don’t all have the same effect on our bodies.

The Glycemic Response 🔎

All sugars don’t have the same immediate impact on the level of sugar found in our blood. This is called the glycemic response. The glycemic power of a sugar on the body decreases as we go from glucose to sucrose to fructose. Consuming one gram of glucose makes your glycemic index rise higher than a gram of fructose. Fructose has, in many circles, a bad reputation principally because it’s used as an additive in industrial food production (which makes it using cornstarch). But in strawberries, it’s perfectly dosed (keep reading to find out more) and contributes greatly to the fruit’s sweet taste.

Sugar and Taste 😋

When we’re eating, not all of the sugars are sensed in the same way and with the same intensity by our taste buds. The sugary power of fructose is, for example, 1.8x stronger than that of sucrose, even though sucrose has a greater glycemic effect. And the sugary power of glucose is only 60% that of sucrose. When taking a Brix measurement, these differences aren’t taken into account, and so having the same Brix number isn’t necessarily an accurate reflection of the sugary taste we might experience when eating a strawberry (or any other fruit or vegetable).

Real world 📚

If a given strawberry only has 2 grams of glucose, it will seem to be less sweet than a strawberry with 1 gram of fructose. By having a high amount of fructose, strawberries will have fewer calories but still be sweeter in taste — basically, they’ll be the best!

Now that we’ve got sugars down, let’s look a bit at how they exist in strawberries.

→ A quick note on “supermarket” strawberries: to get this data, we analyzed cartons of Gariguette berries (grown in France), Ciflorette (France), and Fortuna (Spain). The result is the average of the 3.

Results? As you can see, the sugar levels in our strawberries are equal or superior to those that came from the supermarket. What’s more, the fructose level is much higher than normal, which explains the extra sweet taste of our berries.

The “Magnum” 🍓

As we said in the previous article, the sugar level varies depending on where we are in the production cycle. You can see this in the table below. Here the strawberries have generally less sugar at the beginning of the cycle, arrive at an apex in the middle, and then come back down a bit at the end. Notice something else? The “Magnum” is the sweetest of all (and now you know why we chose it).

On the next graph, you can see that our Brix numbers are, on average, higher than those reported by the CTIFL. The range seen in our strawberries is due to a higher number of measurements (24 data points compared to 7 for the CTIFL).

The complete, detailed results for sugar levels in our strawberries confirms that they’re very sweet. Throughout the growing process, our results are comparable or superior to the fruits analyzed by the reference body in France, the CTIFL.

By the way, here’s a note that we absolutely loved 👇

Even though we’re on the right path, there’s still a long way to go. We’ve still got lots of things to improve (harvest homogeneity, early-cycle quality, etc.) and innovation is at the heart of what we’re doing. Don’t worry, we’ll keep you updated on the results as they come in.

Bonus: The Sugar/Acid Balance 🔬

What’s the role of acid in all this? Acid gives balance to the fruit’s taste, contributing a very “bright” feel. In strawberries, we find citric, ascorbic, malic, ellagic, and pantothenic acids. You might recognize ascorbic acid, since it’s what we commonly refer to as Vitamin C. And vitamins are precisely the subject of our next article. Keep an eye out, it’ll be here next week.

Preview: We’ll look at the role of vitamins in the history of maritime empires (oh yes!), the differences between C/B1/B2/B9, and how today’s standards compare with results from our strawberries.

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