Two crops for each cultivar, red sweet peppers (cultivar: Banji; seed company: Efal) and yellow sweet peppers (cultivar: Liri Seed; company: Hazera), were harvested in a commercial greenhouse in Camehin located in southwest Israel. The first crop (denoted as ‘Set1’) was harvested from the 12th fruit setting on November 2017 and the second crop (denoted as ‘Set2’) from the 16th fruit setting on January 2019. The peppers were selected from four maturity classes. The peppers were initially classified into immature (classes 1 and 2, defined as ‘not to be harvested’) and mature (classes 3 and 4, defined as ‘to be harvested’) peppers by professional human harvesters in the greenhouse. The mature peppers were manually harvested in the morning of the experiment by the harvesters, and then were randomly chosen for the experiment by two expert observers and classified into classes 3 and 4 according to surface color (95–100% colored were defined as class 4; all others were defined as class 3). Classes 1 and 2 were manually harvested by the observers according to surface color (0–5% colored were defined as class 1; all others were defined as class 2).

For set 1 the third letter in each file name indicates the maturity level of the pepper. (A-class 1, B-class2, C-class 3, D-class 4) For set 2 the L_ on the file name indicates the maturity level of the pepper (for example R_L2_P10_S1 is a pepper from class 2)