How do you know if the Musang King you’re looking at is real or fake? Could you be buying a D24 that’s passing itself off as a Musang king at twice the price per kilo?
Luckily, for most of us in South East Asia, we usually buy our fruits direct from a fruit vendor. If we’re not satisfied with the fruit or in anyway not convinced, we match right back up to that vendor and make our complaints very well known. The vendor will usually try to make amends by offering another durian which they consider better quality (sometimes this is a ruse to test if the consumer is a genuine connoisseur, otherwise they will have gotten away with selling a cheap durian at a higher value).
However, if you’re in China where:
1) durian is imported and sold in a wet market
2) there is a likelihood of scammers trying to flog off durian in anyway possible
3) where people may try to “fake” a durian
How do you know your durian is the Musang king and not an inferior variety or heaven forbid, not a durian at all?
A tech company with the name ZXCLaa technology has come up with a solution. To insert a tiny RFID tag into the husk of the durian which consumers can detect with their own mobile phone.
This is certainly a very innovative way to identify the Musang king from a particular company or plantation.
It’s certainly very exciting if the durian can be linked directly to information on the plantation and perhaps even the tree it came from. Can you imagine if you decided that you liked the flavour from a specific tree and decided to buy up the entire harvest just from that tree?
Well, it’ll be good enough just to know a particular plantation that you like.. it would be like a particular vintage of wine from a vineyard. Worth collecting, worth freezing, worth savouring and sharing with other friends and family.
Will keep an eye on it and can’t wait to test it out of it comes to HK. It’ll be extra work for the exporters, more manpower will be needed to carry out this project. Let’s just hope it’s not an excuse to put prices up.
Note: I can’t find anything on ZXCLaa but it could be a govt linked project in Malaysia to assist in the identification mandate.
Dedicated to Durians 