Mechanical Fruit Firmness Tester

I was reading an email in gmail and, despite the email’s total lack of fruit-related content, Google decided to display an ad for a “mechanical fruit firmness tester”.

As it turns out, there’s an entire fruit firmness industry. You can buy mechanical fruit firmness testers, computerized fruit firmness testers, and fruit firmness charts! You can also read incredible promotional copy like:

The MDT is not just another electronic firmness tester. It is the first device designed to measure the internal quality of all types of agricultural products, including tree-fruit. The MDT can act as a highly accurate Magness-Taylor type test device, but also has the capability of measuring internal fruit firmness under constant rate, creep (fruit material deformation under constant pressure — a standard engineering materials test we believe measures the level of cell turgor / cell wall breakdown), and crispness (energy released by fracturing fruit material — essentially quantifying the crunch produced by a mechanical bite).

Whenever you can incorporate the phrase “cell turgor” into your PR materials, you know you’ve won.