Avocados are a tricky fruit to buy.
Sure, we can all agree that they’re earth's creamy green darlings, but the only thing more frustrating than waiting for an avocado to properly ripen is opening one only to discover that the half you saved for later has turned into inedible brown mush.
“It’s one of those fruits that you buy and eat where you inherently suffer disappointment, because it’s already gone brown or it goes to waste,” agricultural engineer Jeff Hastings said to Mashable Australia.
That’s why Hastings decided to invent a little something called the Natavo Zero with the help of an Australian-based company called Nature Technologies. Essentially, it is a technology that purports to show down the browning process of avocados by stripping it of a particular enzyme in the fruit which causes it to brown when exposed to oxygen.
Of course, while this all sounds fine and worth a reasonable expense (especially for those of us who consume avocados on the regular), the problem is that for now, the two models available are aimed at large-scale food makers, and not your average consumer.
Basically, all one needs to do to lengthen the life of an avocado is place an open fruit (be it halved, diced, sliced, or mushed) onto a conveyor belt, where it will be treated for five to six minutes. Not exactly conducive to my tiny Brooklyn kitchen, but perfectly suitable for a large corporation that uses enough avocados to justify the expense.
Currently, the conveyor belts come in two differently sized models: one that processes 551 lbs an hour, and one that does 1,102 lbs an hour.
But don’t lose hope, home-guac enthusiasts.
"Our focus is definitely on the industry, [to those] who provide a finished product to consumers, like fast food restaurants or airlines. However, it's not impossible for us to develop a consumer scale product in [the] future," Hastings said to Mashable Australia.