Peach Fuzz

Do peaches have fuzz? Or is ‘peach-fuzz’ just an urban myth….

We used to get this question a lot and the short answer is yes, all peaches grow with fuzz on them! If you’ve been peach-picking, you probably knew the right answer. But when you think about getting those sweet Georgia peaches each summer, you’ve probably never seen fuzzy peaches. Why is that?

It goes back many decades. Retail grocers started to figure out that their customers wouldn’t buy fruit because of the quality, but instead, they would select the best looking fruit. And fuzzy peaches did not look as attractive to consumers. Experiments were conducted on which peaches people would pick! This led many growers to start growing peaches based on the look of the peach and the coloring it would have, and less about the taste. Fortunately, the folks at Pearson Farm don’t grow peaches with this mentality. Their focus is on what will taste the best, even if it means sometimes it won’t be the prettiest.

So, how do you defuzz a peach? And we’ll just all accept that defuzz is a word…

It’s actually pretty easy! Once the peaches have been harvested, they’re placed in bins that go through a hydrocooling process. While that sounds pretty complicated, hydrocooling is simply a way to rapidly cool the peaches by running near-freezing water over them. This gently knocks all the fuzz right off, while not damaging the delicate peaches.

And another huge benefit of doing this is it brings the temperature of the peaches down after coming in from the orchard. Think about how hot it can be in the Georgia sun, often times the field temperature is well over 100 degrees in the summer.

All of this is part of the process of bringing you our amazing (non-fuzzy) peaches!