Disruptive technology to reduce food waste and post-harvest energy use

In the context of the Fruit Attraction event, the FULLY collaboration project was presented, defined by the participants as "The alliance of experts to bring you fresh, healthy and safe fruit from the field to your table in a sustainable way". FULLY is a cross-cutting project that brings together the entire value chain of the agri-food sector. Our partner DECCO Ibérica has been one of the participants in this project. In the words of Germán Álvarez, quality manager of Iberiana Frucht "FULLY is a project that is the result of the joint efforts of many companies, whose focus has always been to provide solutions that improve current practices without hindering the operation of the fruit and vegetable warehouse". FULLY has had the invaluable collaboration of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, headed by Prof. Dr. Ana Fita, whose task has been to "act as an external partner and blindly analyse the performance of the coating on different fruits and varieties, measuring both physicochemical and organoleptic parameters through, among others, tastings with panels of trained consumers" according to her own words. What was initially going to be a commercial pilot of a few shipments, turned into a trial of 7.5 million kilos marketed given the good results that were being achieved. This huge test bench has been possible thanks to the collaboration of 8 key warehouses and the results of the FULLY project "Thanks to the positive trend in the parameters measured, the good performance in protecting the organoleptic value of the fruit and the maintenance of quality both in the cold-storage warehouse and on the supermarket shelf at ambient temperature, we have been able to generate a huge amount of knowledge to perfect the coating to the current state of the art" Elena Sanchis, Technical Director of DECCO Ibérica and EAMEA. "The success of the FULLY project is the collaboration of different companies in the value chain, which have come together to optimise the amount of marketable fruit, reducing food waste and reducing energy use in post-harvest. Sustainability has to be tackled together, cooperating maximises the positive impact" Jaume Santonja Marketing Director of DECCO EAMEA. As a result of this inter-company collaboration and its commitment to consumers to offer them fresh fruit from anywhere in the world with all its flavour, a new way of preserving the freshness of the fruit with all its natural ingredients and original flavour will be introduced. In the coming days the fresh fruit world will have detailed knowledge of what is sure to be talked about as a disruptive technology.