Probably the single most important component responsible for making the fruit basket the most popular gift in history is the modern technology applied to the delivery of the product itself. Overnight delivery from almost anywhere in the world, is what makes the fruit basket the most versatile and exotic of gifts available.

When fruits from Afghanistan can be picked on a Wednesday, delivered to a manufacturer in America on Thursday, assembled and sent out to you on the same day and on your Holiday table by Friday morning, that is something never envisioned by the Ancient Kings and Queens who dined on the finest of fruit from their kingdoms.

Were it not for the existence of the fruit basket, very few people would have cared enough to pay the higher prices necessary to consume fresh cherries from South America and fresh pineapples from Hawaii in the dead of winter, when the temperatures reach 15-degrees below zero Fahrenheit, on the East Coast.

But the idea of surprising a loved one, or celebrating a birth, or rewarding a good customer with freshly picked, sweet, exotic fruits at precisely the time when they are not available, provided the fuel for the idea of shipping quality fruits around the world on a mass basis. Youd be surprised to learn that the bulk of off-season, global fruit deliveries in America are not consumed through supermarkets, but rather through fruit basket gift sales delivered to your door.

Several companies, most notably Federal Express and United Parcel Services and lately the United States Postal Service make a large percentage of their profits not from delivering papers and envelopes to their customers, but in moving vast quantities of fresh fruits from the growing countries to the mass producers of fruit baskets and then by individually delivering the finished fruit basket from their warehouses to your door. Planeloads full of quality, freshly picked fruit that only saw a truck on their way to and from the airport, are delivered daily to huge warehouses all over America to be selected and arranged in wicker baskets, wrapped and addressed and sent out again to the final consumer. Think about that the next time you bite into a fresh strawberry from South America, or a fresh fig from the Middle East. Somebody grew it; somebody picked it and packaged it; somebody else drove it to the airport in Honolulu or Beirut or Rio de Janeiro; somebody flew it to America, where somebody else put it all together into one basket, slapped your label on it, and sent it to you for your eating pleasure. Thats a lot of work and a lot of effort just to get you to enjoy eating some fruit. But in the end, thanks to modern technology, the fruit basket delivery system works like a charm, keeping farmers around the world busy all year long and keeping customers all across the globe happy and healthy, eating the best fruits available from anywhere in the world, at any time of year.