Infrared spectroscopy allows defining a maturity index with close correlation to ripening stage

DA-Meter, fruit quality, shelf-life, sugars, postharvest, poscosecha, poscosecha Fruit quality as a concept encompasses sensory and mechanical properties, nutritive values and food safety. Fruit quality has declined, leading to consumer dissatisfaction, largely due to the wrong harvest date. In addition, quality is poorly defined since the parameters mainly considered are fruit size and skin colour. Other attributes such as flesh firmness, sugar content, acidity and aroma, which are perceived by the consumer as overall fruit quality, are seldom considered by the farmer and by other individuals along the value chain. Up to now, several studies have been carried out on fruit quality assessment by using traditional methods, which are cheap and fast, but do not consider other quality traits, as antioxidant power, aroma volatile emission, soluble sugars and organic acids content. The assessment of these parameters requires sophisticated equipments (i.e. HPLC, GC-MS) and is costly and time consuming. Moreover, destructive analyses can be performed only on a limited number of fruit. In recent years, extensive research has been focused on the development of non-destructive techniques for assessing internal fruit quality attributes allowing extending the assessment to a high number of fruit, to repeat the analysis on the same samples and to achieve real-time information on several fruit quality parameters at the same time. Among the non-destructive techniques, visible/Near infrared spectroscopy (VIS/NIR) can be efficiently used for determining traditional fruit quality traits and concentration of the main organic acids and reducing sugars. In addition, this technique allows defining a new maturity index with a close correlation to fruit ethylene emission and ripening stage. This ?Absorbance Difference? Index (IAD) can be used for precisely predicting harvest date and for grouping fruit in homogeneous classes of ripening. SourcesCosta, G. and Noferini, M. 2013. USE OF NON-DESTRUCTIVE DEVICES AS A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR FRUIT QUALITY ENHANCEMENT. Acta Hort. (ISHS) 998:103-115 Acta Horticulturae 998, The EUFRIN Thinning Working Group SymposiaThe picture is by icnirs2013.org ? ?