Consumer expectations for grapes often center around their visual appeal, taste, and mouthfeel. For instance, the satisfying crunch of a crisp green grape is highly desirable. Similarly, grocery stores maintain strict standards for freshness to ensure marketability. However, these expectations are predominantly based on the vinifera grape, setting a benchmark that muscadines—though beloved in the Southeastern United States—struggle to meet. Muscadine grapes differ significantly from table grapes, leading to challenges in consumer acceptance and retail adoption. Thin-skinned and firm-fleshed berries are selected in our breeding program to make muscadines more palatable to a wider audience and more appealing to retailers, but could potentially reduce shelf life by increasing transpiration rates. Given these concerns, our study examined a range of attributes related to berry texture and their effects on storage ability. Thirty muscadine genotypes were evaluated over a month-long storage period in which attributes such as firmness, skin thickness, and flesh texture were measured. Our findings indicate that berry firmness decreases during storage relative to initial firmness. However, berries ranking firmer at harvest remained firmer after storage compared to softer genotypes. Importantly, our breeding efforts to enhance texture showed minimal impact on storage ability. These results suggest that selecting for vinifera-like texture traits in muscadines can improve consumer and retailer acceptance without significantly compromising shelf life, offering promising implications for expanding muscadine markets nationwide.
