The original, the granddaddy of all of today's items bought and sold as fruit baskets, was in fact a basket full of assorted fruits. While there is no clear cut evidence when the first fruit basket was wrapped up and delivered to it's overjoyed recipient, it is known that in ancient times fruit baskets were routinely given to kings and feudal lords all over the world as a sign of respect and loyalty.
For whatever occasion applied, the coronation of a new king, a royal birth or even a wedding, the kingdom was carefully searched and only the best of all the fruits available were carefully assembled into a wicker basket and presented to the royal family. It wasn't until sometime later that other products, perhaps spices from far away lands, plants, wines and other products not indigenous to the kingdom, were included with the fruit. That's how it all began. From that point forward, whenever that was, fruit baskets became a name only for any conglomeration of goods, almost always containing some amount of fruit, that were given as gifts and delivered in baskets.
The first items included with the fruit were flowers, wines, nuts and chocolates. For some reason, this selection was viewed as the natural choice to accompany fruit in the basket. As the world slowly became a smaller place and products from one side of the globe began to routinely travel to the other, fruit baskets became more and more diverse. Can you imagine the look on the face of a European King when presented, in the dead of a cold winter, with a basket of fresh fruit from some far away land he'd never seen? It's the same look people have today when their fruit baskets arrive at any time of the year.
One of the popular manifestations of the original fruit basket is the "Fruit of the Month" basket. Shipped in traditional wicker baskets, these pure, fruit-only baskets arrive monthly all year round with the finest fresh fruits grown somewhere on the globe not affected by seasonal weather. Fresh cherries arrive in December, grown in South America. Oranges arrive in New York in January, grown on organic farms in California. Plums and grapes arrive in October. Everybody, everywhere is constantly searching for a way to make the original fruit basket more exciting and new again to capture a share of this huge, growing market.
