There was a time not too far gone when fresh pineapple was a novelty in a grocery store. Consumers were not quite sure what to do with a product they were used to consuming from cans or atop a holiday ham. That has clearly changed. And now that shoppers are familiar with fresh pineapple, they need to be better educated about how to pick the best fruit, said Alan Dolezal, vice president of sales for Turbana Corp. of Coral Gables, FL, and its premium Fyffes Gold pineapple.

“Go back maybe a couple of decades and pineapple was still looked at by your average consumer more as an exotic item, whereas now it may not be totally mainstream, but it’s positioned a lot closer to mainstream than as an exotic,” Mr. Dolezal said. “The key now is to educate consumers about the myriad of ways to prepare and consume fresh pineapple other than just coring it up and eating it.”

That is part of the educational process. The remainder — and it is a fairly large leap — is teaching consumers that shell color does not indicate ripeness.

“There’s still a pretty big misconception that there’s a linear relationship between the color of the fruit and the sweetness of or taste of the fruit,” Mr. Dolezal said. “On the Fyffes pineapple we state on the label that the product is harvested ripe and ready to eat regardless of shelf color. What determines the harvest point for fresh pineapple is not the shell color, it’s having the proper Brix level, proper acidity level, proper Brix-to-acidity ratio, and the proper level of translucency — you can have all those criteria reside in their optimum ranges within a variety of external color stages.”

The pineapple’s rise to recognition began in the 1990s with the development of the MD2 variety, the Golden Ripe.

“That pineapple basically was so superior to anything else that had proceeded it in terms of its ability to withstand long shipment times and still retain a shelf life and still retain its optimum taste characteristics that it really revolutionized the industry,” Mr. Dolezal said. “You saw huge gains in per capita consumption and huge increases in production from 1994-95 up through the early part of the last decade and it was really like anything else: like the old saying, imitation is the highest form of flattery. People saw what the potential was with this item and everybody wanted to start growing it, everybody wanted a piece of the action.”

Before that explosion, there was typically more demand than supply for fresh pineapple. By 2008 the industry began “seeing the flipside of the coin, where you really saw an oversupply in North America and pretty much worldwide,” Mr. Dolezal said.

That said, “The growth is still there on the item, no doubt, we’re still just at the tip of the iceberg. Fresh pineapple’s about 1.2 percent of your produce department sales; contrast that with something like bananas at 7.5-8 percent. There’s a long way to go with this item, there are a lot of gains that can be garnered.”

To make that happen, the industry must focus on quality — which is Turbana’s top priority with the Fyffes line.

“The whole focus of our pineapple program has been built around quality and service,” Mr. Dolezal said. “We have a premium-quality product; the way that we maintain that premium quality is by giving the growers a good return so that they can re-invest in their production infrastructure. The growers are our lifeblood. Turbana also wants to be recognized as and position ourselves as the responsible supplier of choice, so social and environmental stewardship in our production areas is as important to us as is producing great pineapples in those areas. So far that business model has served us very well. In these difficult economic times, there’s obviously been a delicate balance in retailers’ minds as far as the whole price-quality trade-off, but people still recognize quality and the consumer will still pay for quality. With a modest economic recovery in progress, it also seems like consumers have a little more disposable income, so their purchase decision at retail is no longer totally a zero-sum game between — for instance, ‘Am I going to spend $3.99 for this pineapple or am I going to buy a bag of apples, or $3.99 worth of citrus or five pounds of bananas instead?’ It doesn’t have to be totally one or the other. People can widen the variety of their cart a little bit again and it’s good to see that happening.”