This isn’t your average blueberry.
A giant blueberry made the record books this week, capturing the Guinness World Record title of world’s heaviest blueberry for its scale-tipping weight of 20.4 grams — around ten times the average weight of a normal berry.
The fruit was picked on November 13 in New South Wales, Australia, and measures just shy of four centimetres wide, or about the size of a golfball.
A photo shared by the grower shows just how whopping the monster berry is, taking up much of the outstretched palm holding it.
“When we put it on the scales I was a bit shocked,” Brad Hocking, blueberry lead at Costa Group, a 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, which is known for producing a large fruit.
“Eterna as a variety has a really great flavour 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 demolishes the previous record-holder, which was also an Australian-grown berry that weighed 16.20 grams.
Produce growers will often compete to grow gargantuan-sized fruit and vegetables for fun, but sometimes taste or quality can be compromised — that’s not the case with this particular variety, the grower promises, 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 flavour as would be expected when developing a premium variety blueberry,” Hocking said.
He told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the berry has been living in an industrial freezer while the verification process was completed. Now, they’re pondering 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 tossing out ideas like casting it in resin or “mounting it on the wall or something.”