The (secret) recipe for the perfect strawberry 🍓

Our mission has been simple: make excellent fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides accessible to everyone. But what does “excellent” mean? For us, it’s two things: flavor, yes, but also and most importantly nutritional value. This second point is what we’re going to talk about in this series of articles. Our way of growing upends how things used to be done, so it’s time to look at the nutritional value of the fruits we’re growing. As a biology expert at Agricool, I took to my keyboard to let you know everything we do here.

• #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! 💪

Looks like me, Pierre-François (but you can call me PF) !

Hello, science! 🔎

From the very beginning, we’ve been recording the nutritional value of our strawberries. How? By conducting analyses in our own super lab and with the help of external, specialized labs.

These analyses let us study every aspect very closely. One thing is sure — everything went under the microscope. Next, we compared our results to both national and international standards (and you can find that data directly thanks to the internet):

• The French national agency for food safety (ANSES), the key reference in France 🇫🇷
• The US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the key reference for everyone in the world 🌎
• The French technical body for fruits and vegetables (CTIFL), the key farming reference in France 🇫🇷

Thanks to this approach, we can have a global and objective view on the nutritional value of not only our strawberries but also all those that are available today (different varieties, different ways of growing, different regions…).

The nutritional value of a strawberry 🌿

Before getting into the heart of the matter, there’s one very important detail: the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables changes not only thanks to certain options (variety, growing technique, storage, analytical method, etc.) but also during the course of the growing process itself.

→ The sugar example

The sugar level is typically quite low at the beginning of a harvest, when the strawberries are large and numerous. As time goes on, the number and size of the fruits diminish, and the sugar level increases. Why? It’s a dilution effect. In other words, a strawberry plant in ideal conditions will produce a certain maximum amount of sugar each day. Thus if there are fewer fruits on the plant, they will have higher sugar levels (and vice versa).

Strawberry connoisseurs, read this! 👇

You love super sweet strawberries? There are some growers in Japan who use the dilution effect to produce very large, very sweet berries. How? During the growing process, they cut away most of the flowers. This way, they get only 1 or 2 berries per plant (as opposed to 25–30 normally!). All of the sugars produced by the plant are thus concentrated in these fruits known as “Sugar bombs”. These are very rare strawberries, with prices that are usually around €30 per 250 grams (€120 per kilo!).

Taking this kind of change into account, it’s not rare to find a nutritional value that doubles between two different samples, particularly if they come from different varieties and different growers. This is why the ANSES reports on upper and lower limits rather than simple averages that aren’t necessarily very pertinent outside of a certain context. Repeated nutritional analyses (which we do!) are still the best way to estimate the qualities found in a certain crop of fruits. And just like with all data, the reliability of any analysis is proportional to the number of samples analyzed.

Close-up on a strawberry

So those are the methods; let’s see the results.

The nutritional value of a fruit is judged using several criteria:

• The most famous: sugar and vitamins
• The lesser-known: antioxidants, fatty acids and minerals

To know the nutritional value of a fruit, there are 2 options: trust your taste buds and/or look at the nutritional values. The latter depend directly on its composition. You might know it already, but fruits are principally composed of water and sugars. The other 3 components are minerals, proteins and lipids. Other elements (vitamins and antioxidants) are present as well, but in very small quantities (measured in milli- and micrograms for 100 grams of fruit) that aren’t visible on the graphs below.

Measuring Energy Values 🔍

Now we need to quantify the various elements that make up a strawberry, which can be measured in either joules or calories. We can also measure the energy provided to the body when one consumes the fruit.

A little catching-up 🏃‍

To function normally, the body consumes calories. For an adult between 18–55 years of age whose body-mass index (= weight/height²) is 22 and who partakes in an average amount of physical activity per day, the average recommended calorie intake is 2100 kcal for a woman and 2600 kcal for a man.

Examples

• While reading this article, your brain is consuming roughly 1.5 calories per minute
• A person who weighs 70kg and who runs 10km in an hour consumes roughly 720 calories

Back to the strawberry

The caloric value of a strawberry is, on average, 32 kcal per 100g. A large strawberry weighs 50g. It supplies the energy needed for 10 minutes of walking or 5 minutes of biking.

And just for comparison’s sake, the caloric value of 100g of spaghetti is 158 kcal.

And the Agricool strawberry?

The caloric value of our berries is slightly higher than average, at between 40–50 kcal/100g. In other words, the energy value of our fruits is a bit higher than the norms recorded by ANSES. This is explained by the higher sugar content of our strawberries. Essentially, most of the caloric value of a strawberry comes from its sugars. We’ll get into that in more detail in the next article.

Comparative analysis of strawberry composition

There’s one other point to note: our strawberries contain relatively little water. That explains their firm, fleshy texture. Their fats and proteins are standard, as are the minerals. And the sugar level is a bit higher than average, which gives them that little something extra.

And it seems like this last part (sugar!) is the most important for many people. If you want to learn more about that aspect, keep an eye out for my second article next week.

What will it cover? Well, among other things, the Brix index, the glycemic effect, and a detailed analysis of different strawberry varieties (including our own).

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