GATTON, KY - No shopper likes a bruised avocado, but according to Professor Daryl Joyce from the University of Queensland in Gatton, the chief cause of this unslightly occurance are consumers themselves. It's common practice for many consumers to squeeze an avocado before purchasing it as a way to test how ripe it is. It is this very practice that is doing so much damage to countless fruits at the retail aisle.

Bruising is a big problem for retailers because not only does bruising lead to higher rates of disease, but avocado eaters are unique in that shopping data quoted on ABC reveals that customers who purchase an avocado but have a bad experience will generally refuse to purchase additional avocados for up to two weeks. It's easy to see how a few bad experiences could really eat into a retailer's profits during peak avocado season.

"We were able to rule out everything up to the point of the ripening process," Joyce explained. "We placed an instrumented sphere (a small device the size of a cricket ball with sensors inside) into the middle of a fruit tray to record the bumps and thumps all the way through."

With this and a $25,000 glove laced with pressure sensors that identify exactly how customers distributed pressure on the avocado when examining it, the researchers found that it is the customer and not the distributor that does the most damage to the avocado before it is sold.

“We don't like to use the word 'blame'," Professor Joyce laughed. "People tend to squeeze a couple of fruit in deciding which one they want. Then they put the other ones back.”

With each squeeze, Joyce explains that a little bit more damage is done to the product. This adds up over time.

"That was interesting, and exciting, and it became quite clear we need to teach people how to handle softening avocado fruit,” he said.

How do you fix this problem? Joyce has a couple ideas in mind.

He thinks that the best solution so far would be to set up “decision-aid tools” in retail aisles which customers could use without needing to squeeze, and damage, the fruit.

“...we'll try and make some kind of tool that'll allow people to get a feel for the fruit when shopping, but not to squeeze the fruit anymore," he shared. “A very simple device connected to lights that that will tell you whether it's ready to eat."

The design is already there. Joyce says that a simplified, and much cheaper, version of the glove his team used for the experiment could do the job nicely.

One way or another, retailers will need to come up with a solution to this problem if they want to maintain a plethora of avocados on their shelves that are “worth the squeeze,” as the saying goes.