Acai berries are notoriously difficult to work with. They degrade within 24 hours, so unless you live very near the palm on which they live, you are very unlikely to be able to find whole berries. Ever. The nearest thing you are going to get to a whole acai berry something that has been processed as little as possible.

For most people, then, the nearest thing to real acai will be acai purée. Acai purée is made very close to where the berries are harvested: they are collected and then mashed up and hot bottled.

Because there is so little processing that goes on — and so few additives added to the purée — it still will not last very long. Certainly purées will not last the 12 to 18 months required by the big supermarket chains in order for them to consider a product viable. This is why you will never see acai berry purée in the larger shops; in fact pretty much the only place you will find it is over the Internet. Fortunately there are lots of good web stores that deal with 100% pure acai purée, so do a little bit of searching and you could just come up with a winner.