Supermarket Tomato Taste

The average US tomato was bred for mass shipping and tastes like wet cardboard. Try an heirloom tomato, or something else less mass produce at a farmers market - they taste completely different.

The transportation thing is what I've heard as well. Basically, the fruits are picked before they fully ripen so they don't get damaged in transport. For that reason you'll see chefs (e.g. J Kenji Lopez-Alt) recommend that you use canned tomatoes rather than fresh when you can. Tomatoes destined for canning are chosen for flavor and not beauty, and are picked when fully ripe. So you will generally get superior flavor from canned tomatoes.

Some things you buy in the store don’t even taste remotely like what you grow. Tomatoes are night and day difference. They pick them green for travel robustness, and “ripen” then with ethylene, so you’re eating a red but unripe tomatoes.Strawberries are another one. Do yourself a favor and get some ripe strawberries locally sometime. They’re nothing like that Drischoll’s stuff in the stores!

Apples and tomatoes are not good examples for your point. There's a tremendous variety of apples available in standard grocery stores, most of which are significantly tastier than the red delicious. And bland tomatoes are a result of having to ship tomatoes, which is near impossible with ripe fruit, hence selecting robust varieties, picking early, and having them ripen in transit. There too, increasingly you can find heirloom varieties in stores, however they are understandably more expensi

Unfortunately, large-scale agriculture optimizes for shipping and shelf-life and when organic producers grow large enough, they must do the same. Tomatoes are the classic example of this, but it's true for everything. For example, pretty much all the avocados available in the US are the Hass variety---because they have a nice, thick skin. But there are some really great tasting varieties that are mostly unavailable outside of Central America or the Caribbean simply because they don't transport w

Store-bought tomatoes have been selectively bred for appearance, shelf-life, and durability. They taste terrible compared to home-grown, vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes but the latter would not survive all of the shipping and handling in the grocery supply chain.

My experience is that contemporary varieties of tomatoes grown at home are much better than those grown by the big producers. I'm not sure why, but our tomatoes are always red all the way through. The ones from the store are often whiter and coarse-grained inside. Actually, the same thing happens with strawberries.

Homegrown tomatoes and tomatoes from the supermarket are two totally different fruits. They don’t even taste the same.Same goes with strawberries and probably a lot of things.

Explains why most supermarket tomatoes are terrible

I'd wager that the reason for the difference in taste is in the freshness.It is difficult to farm at scale and sell produce year round across a continent; time to consumption is a luxury beaten out of it at that scale and food often suffers under it. Only the varieties of tomatoes, etc. that can withstand changing temperatures and conditions, make it to market weeks later, and still look good enough to sell will be used, and these are often not as flavorful both initially and after sever