Publications
Imagine how many strawberry smoothies you could make from this 289g monster!
Grown by an Israeli farmer, it’s thought to be the world’s biggest strawberry.
The supersized strawberry was cultivated on Tzahi Ariel’s family farm near the city of Netanya in central Israel in February last year.
Tzahi kept the strawberry frozen for a year while waiting for judges to confirm that it would be written into the history books.
The wait was worth it, though. This week, Guinness World Records confirmed it as the heaviest on record.
“When we heard, it was an amazing feeling,” he says.
“I jumped in the car, laughed and sang. We’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”
While most strawberries weigh about 7g, this whopper tips the scale at 289g. As if that’s not impressive enough, it’s 18cm long, 4cm thick and has a circumference of 34cm.
According to Dr Nir Dai, a researcher from the Israel Agricultural Research Organization, the strawberry, of the Ilan variety, was not genetically modified.
“The strawberry season, which starts in late January and early February, was particularly cold,” he says.
“The strawberry developed slowly for more than 45 days from flowering, which caused it’s large size at full ripening stage.”
According to Guinness, Tzahi’s heavyweight strawberry outweighed the previous record set by Japanese farmer Koji Nakao in January 2015. Nakao’s berry was a Japanese variety known as Amaou and weighed 250g.
Sources: CNN, Guinness World Records
