Fresno State marketing students lay claim to record fruit salad

It’s only natural that Fresno County, the heart of the world’s richest agricultural area, should lay claim to the world record fruit salad, and Fresno State marketing students have made that possible.

On Thursday, Nov. 3, 2011, students in a strategic marketing class at Fresno State’s Craig School of Business put a 2,500-gallon plastic water tank full of fruit salad on the scale at P-R Farms in Clovis and it weighed 10,440 pounds.

That’s three-quarters of a ton more than the 8,866-pound fruit salad prepared on July 27, 2003, in Peru that is the standard in the “Guinness World Records” book.

For now. Guinness must certify the Fresno State team’s achievement for it to be official.

The students, taught by marketing professor Dr. William Rice, teamed up with local fruit packing companies that donated apples, Asian pears, nectarines, peaches and plums. For it to be a record, Guinness requires that there be at least five fruits and that they be equally represented in the total.

The fruit must be cut by hand, which began at 8 a.m. in an assembly-line-like process involve Fresno State students, students from the culinary program at the Institute of Technology and other volunteers. As fruit was cut, it was placed in plastic-lined bins and held in cold storage.

Because the fruit salad – by Guinness rule – must be fully edible, all of the preparation work must be conducted hygienically.

The bins of fruit were dumped into the tank, some lemon juice was added and the tank was moved to a truck scale for the weigh-in just after 7 p.m.

Guinness requires that two officials certify that regulations were met for record consideration. California Highway Patrol officer Axel Reyes, known to local TV viewers for traffic updates and as a patrol spokesman, and Frank Alvarez, a forestry technician with the United States Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, were the official witnesses.

For more information, contact Sam Mabanta at 661.932.1910 or sammo@mail.fresnostate.edu.