Don’t Fear the Farmer’s Market! Apps to Demystify Buying Fresh Fruit and Veggies

With warm weather comes fresh produce and Farmer’s Markets. And, yes, there IS an app for that! In fact, a number of great apps help demystify the produce-buying experience, be it at your favorite farmer’s market or regular grocery store.

The Specialty Produce app draws on a database of more than 1,400 produce items and features information about history, nutrition, cultivation, seasonal availability and recipes. You can search by name or even use the price-look up codes used to identify produce. You can set it up to get notified when specific fruits and veggies are spotted in markets near you. Free for Android and iOS, with a pro versionsfeaturing even more features for $2.99

Perfect Produce is another quick and easy tool to help with purchasing produce. The app tells you what to look for and avoid in specific fruits and veggies. Perfect Produce also offers the ability to search for produce based on nutritional content, which means you can search for foods high in say, fiber, calcium, or vitamin C. And Perfect Produce tells you how to properly handle and store food. Free for iOS and Android.

Harvest will help you find what’s in season in your area and offers tips and tricks for selecting more than 120 produce items. You also get nutritional information about produce along with storing instructions. One thing that makes Harvest unique and useful is that it has information about pesticide levels for certain produce, helping you decide when you may want to consider going organic. Harvest is for iOS and costs $1.99.

Here’s PC Mike Wendland with his report for NBC-TV: