Food, glorious food. We need it, we love it and we often buy too much of it. That’s not a problem for packaged food or freezable food, but for our fresh fruit and veg, it’s a real shame to let it go off. So, here’s a few little tips and tricks to keep your greens green and your fruits firm for as long as possible.

1. The Needy Ones

For starters, not all fruit and vegetables mix well together unless you want them to ripen quickly. Fruits like apples, bananas and pears give off ethylene gas. This makes produce sitting alongside them ripen and rot faster. Ethylene is a hormone released by produce as it ripens, with the biggest culprits being ripe apples and bananas. You want to keep those away from your vegetables such as leafy greens and asparagus, along with fruit such as watermelon and grapes, all of who are quite sensitive to the ethylene and won’t last as long near them. The ethylene emitting produce are quite picky and don’t like to live side by side one another either. So basically, they’re needy little fellas who need their own space, okay?

2. Berry Baths

Berries are perhaps one of the most versatile fruits of all; suitable for all meals of the day, for starters or for desserts, and even for use in drinks as well. Moral of the story? Look after your berries. As we all know, it’s not always that easy, and often our beautiful berries can somehow just go moldy overnight. Well, now you can try this; give your berries a hot bath before storing them. This process (called ‘thermotherapy’) simply involves immersing them in their containers, in a pot of hot water. It kills off any mould spores and helps to keep your berries fresher for longer. Keeping them in a single layer also helps keep them fresh too. You’re berry welcome.

3. Leafy Greens

In order to get all the nutrients you can out of leafy greens, they should be eaten within 1-2 days of purchase. Now, in reality, this doesn’t always happen does it…? So, if you’re wanting them to last a little longer, then firstly, get rid of any already rotten leaves as they quickly infect the other healthy leaves. Secondly, wrap the unwashed leaves in a paper towel and store them in a glass airtight container in the fridge. This helps to absorb any excess moisture, which would normally cause the leaves to rot more quickly. There we go, long live leafy greens.

4. Myth Busting

The festering myth that says sticking bananas in the fridge makes them go off more quickly is cutting short the life of a lot of poor bananas. Whilst a banana may well go brown in just a few hours in the fridge, this doesn’t mean that what lies beyond the peel isn’t still perfectly edible. Sounds ominous doesn’t it, ‘beyond the peel’, but in actual fact, the cold temperatures ironically encourage an enzyme found in bananas called polyphenyl oxidase, to polymerise phenols in the banana skin into polyphenols… (Sorry, what?!) In answer to that confused look, basically, the cold does indeed blacken the skin more quickly, but at the same time, keeps the inside from ripening even further. In other words, remember ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’? Well…don’t judge a brown banana by its skin, it’s often still perfectly edible.

5. Active Fresh Blue Light™ - the Protector of Vitamins and Nutrients

You’ve got some tips and tricks but what about the fridge itself? Beko’s Active Fresh Blue Light™ is the protector of vitamins and nutrients! You heard right, it preserves natural flavours and nutritional elements in your healthy fruit and vegetables for longer. You don’t even need to be health obsessed to want your fresh food to give you the health benefits and keeping those nutritional elements in important. Of course, we also want them to still taste good too. You’ll find the Active Fresh Blue Light™ in the crisper of the Beko fridge where it helps your fruit and veg continue to photosynthesise in the fridge. Pretty nifty, hey? Think of it like a greenhouse in your fridge. The beauty of this is your fruit and vegetables are up to 30%* better preserved. Three cheers for this feature!

We may well buy our fresh fruit and veg with all the best intentions, but let’s face it, life happens and often by the time we get to the end of the week, we’re left with fruit and veg that’s a lot squishier and soggier than it was meant to be. With these five top tips and tricks, hopefully your fresh produce can stay fresher and tastier for as long as possible, and you’ll no longer feel a pang of guilt for throwing out food. Plus, it means you can put off starting that diet for a little while longer…we’re all winners!

Find out more about Beko fridges here: https://www.beko.com.au/smart-refrigerators-technology

You can also see how to reduce your food wastage on our blog post, 4 Tips to Reduce Food Wastage: https://www.beko.com.au/blog/4-tips-to-reduce-fresh-food-wastage

* Tested by FRPERC and TÜBİTAK (compared to standard crisper for tomatoes, red and green pepper)