Can a special paper keep your produce fresh?

HOUSTON

It's called FreshPaper, and it claims to keep produce fresh longer.

Produce can look so beautiful and irresistible in the store, but fresh fruit and veggies are fragile.

"I try to buy a little at a time, but then I find run out and then that's also annoying," one shopper told us. "So it's, like, hard to balance."

A new product called FreshPaper promises to keep fruits and veggies fresh two to four times longer -- organically.

"It's made from a mixture of spices, including fenugreek, which supposedly inhibits bacteria growth," said Gayle Williams with Consumer Reports.

Consumer Reports testers placed two sets of blueberries and strawberries with FreshPaper into a fridge -- one set in its original store packaging, and the other in airtight plastic containers. In a different fridge, the same sets of berries but no FreshPaper.

Testers checked the fruit every day. The FreshPaper did not appear to have any effect on the blueberries.

After two weeks, all of the blueberries looked pretty much the same, no matter which container they were in.

The strawberries in their original store packaging without FreshPaper showed some mold growth.

The strawberries with the FreshPaper didn't have any mold, but they were starting to spoil -- same as the berries without the paper.

As for the strawberries in the airtight containers, nearly three weeks later, the ones with the FreshPaper and the ones without the FreshPaper showed signs of spoilage.

"Your best bet to store fresh produce is to put it in a cool, dry place," Williams said. "And no matter how good it looks in the store, resist the urge to buy more than you need."
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