The company has a proprietary ProRipeVIP avocado ripening program, which uses an acoustic firmness sensor to measure the firmness of fruit and deliver evenly-ripened avocados.

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To get around the problem of tomatoes that aren't ripened in the sun, one chef in Cadiz roasts his tomatoes to access a deeper flavor.

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But it escalated in the last decade, when Mexican growers began using an Israeli variety of vine-ripened tomato that better survived the long journey to U.S. supermarkets.

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Mr. Snow doesn't play down his subject's bigotry or his "cranky certainties, " which ripened with age, but he concentrates on Ford's inventive period, when he was not only designing cars but also inventing the parts that went into them.

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When the first crop of John's beloved hillside vineyard ripened in 1978, they couldn't find a picking crew and the grapes hung for three or four days beyond what they judged to be optimal ripeness a delay that would eventually prove to be a blessing, though they didn't know it at the time.

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