This is not your typical blueberry.
A huge blueberry made it into the record books this week, earning the Guinness World Record for being the world’s heaviest blueberry, weighing 20.4 grams — about ten times the average weight of a regular berry.
The fruit was picked on November 13 in New South Wales, Australia, and is almost four centimetres wide, or the size of a golf ball.
A photo shared by the grower shows how big the berry is, taking up most of the outstretched hand holding it.
“When we put it on the scales I was a bit surprised,” Brad Hocking, blueberry lead at Costa Group, an Australian fruit and vegetable producer, told The Guardian. “I knew they were big but had to do a double take to make sure.”
The record-breaking blueberry is of the Eterna variety, known for producing large fruit.
“Eterna as a variety has a really great flavor and consistently large fruit. When we picked this one, there were probably around 20 other berries of a similar size,” Hocking said in a statement.
The new record beats the previous record-holder, also an Australian-grown berry weighing 16.20 grams.
Produce growers often compete to grow extra-large fruit and vegetables for fun, but sometimes taste or quality can be sacrificed — that’s not the case with this particular variety, the grower assures, saying they went through a painstaking 10-year process from breeding to commercialization.
“This really is a delightful piece of fruit. While the fruit is large, there’s absolutely no compromise on quality or flavor, as would be expected when developing a premium variety blueberry,” Hocking said.
He told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the berry has been residing in an industrial freezer while the verification process was completed. Now, they’re considering what its fate should be.
“We all look at it occasionally and smile,” Hocking told the outlet. “I don’t think a smoothie would be the right fate for it.”
Instead, he told the BBC, they’ve been throwing around ideas like encasing it in resin or “mounting it on the wall or something.”
