Recently, several techniques have been developed for vegetable and fruit maturing recognition. Adding hardware designs will enhance the recognition performance. Especially, parallel processing designs efficiently speed up the process functions. This paper utilizes a hardware parallel processing design called field programmable gate array for that purpose. In addition, two different methods; namely K-means clustering and color thresholding are used for recognizing the apple maturation. This study aims to design and implement a mature apple recognition system based on field programmable gate array. The results demonstrate that the color thresholding technique is faster, more reliable and more effective than the K-means clustering technique.