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Nutrient levels in retail grocery stores

A counterintuitive conclusion

For years, every week, his team would walk into grocery stores, buy thousands of produce items the way normal consumers would, and bring them back to the lab to assess nutrient content. Things like how Whole Foods centers their entire branding around fresher, higher quality produce that's better for you, but when he actually tested some expensive apples they were selling from a local orchard advertised with handwritten chalkboard signs, it had so little nutrient content it was barely detectable on their lab-grade machines. Fresh produce is picked before peak ripeness to accommodate for ripening during storage and transport, and the nutrients degrade as it sits on shelves and in refrigerators before it is eventually prepared.

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