Hello, good morning!
How's your week going?
Things are great here; we're still in the middle of orange harvest 🍊. Also, waking up early to get produce from our fellow farmers in different places.
And speaking of which, we're heading to Antonio's farm to pick up none other than Murina tangerines, which are absolutely delicious. Though, it's hard to eat just one, you know?
Here's Antonio hard at work with his tangerines:
But today I won't be talking about oranges or tangerines, but persimmons. If you ordered persimmons not long ago, you should know that we've had a few issues with them…
The flavor is great, but the problem is that they're at an advanced stage of ripeness, and some aren't holding up during transport.
As you can imagine, this situation concerns me, and not just me, but the entire team.
But to truly understand, we need to start from the beginning. Persimmon is a fruit with many varieties, most of which are astringent, meaning you can't just pick one from the tree and eat it directly because it will be harsh.
So, there are two ways to eat these astringent varieties: one is for them to be very soft. This is because when a persimmon ripens naturally, it loses its astringency on its own...
Which, in turn, is a problem for commercialization because they are too soft to withstand transport (which is exactly what has been happening with ours).
Look, this persimmon I'm holding in my hands is ripe, non-astringent, soft, and very sweet:
The other way is to remove their astringency using traditional methods. For this, you have to rub them with alcohol and put them in a pot. The issue with this method is that, being artisanal, it gets complicated if the quantity of persimmons is very large.
There's a third way that I'll tell you about later, and it had to do with the persimmon boom.
But for now, I'd like to finish telling you about the solution we've planned so we can continue sending the persimmons grown on my plots.
However, just because they are soft and ripe doesn't mean they've spoiled. Those are two very different things; their quality is excellent, the problem is that they are very susceptible to bumps.
And the idea is never to have one burst in the box and cause a mess. But anyway...
We are exploring formulas to ensure they are well protected in the box so that impacts affect them as little as possible. This week we sent out tests to see how they perform.
As a gift, we sent our customers a small box of persimmons for follow-up. The idea is for them to tell us if they arrived in good condition to conduct a test, and if it goes well, to send persimmons again.
This is the new packaging:
That's all for today. As I always say: working with nature is beautiful, but she has her ways, and sometimes they are capricious.
We hope the test goes well 🙏🏼 and we can send persimmons again because, as ripe as they are, they are very delicious, very sweet and soft, to eat like a dessert.
For today, I bid you farewell and hope we have luck!
Until next week,
A big hug!
