It’s an old wives tale that pulling the leaves from a pineapple’s crown will tell you if it’s ripe or not. How can you really tell? The truth is that the pineapple ripens from the middle to the outside which means the fruit is ripe on the inside before the outside shell begins to turn color. So, the pineapple can be ripe and ready to eat and still be green on the outside. In our pineapple fields we know how old the fruit is in each parcel of the field. When it’s 20-21 weeks old, we sample the fruit to measure the sugar level and observe the internal color. When the fruit is almost at the correct level of ripeness, the shell color is induced. If we wait for the natural exterior color to develop, the fruit will become too ripe on the inside to ship. However, Mother Nature can play tricks on you. For example, if it’s cool and wet or very hot and dry, the shell color inducing process doesn’t work very well or is very slow so it’s difficult to achieve perfection. This means that sometimes it’s possible to find fruit in the store that is quite green on the outside. But the important point to remember is that we have already checked the fruit for sugar content and internal color so “green don’t mean a thing.” It’s pretty simple, if you’re choosing a Chestnut Hill Farms pineapple in your supermarket, it’s ripe and ready to eat regardless of the external color.