New Approaches on Measurement of Fruit Firmness For Fresh-Cut Products

Abstract

Due to the heavy working conditions of the business world in today's conditions, changes have occurred in the habits of people consuming fruits and vegetables. It is also a fact that the people working in economically developed societies spend less time preparing food, eat at restaurants or take fast food home. Working individuals’ tendency to purchase fruits and vegetables peeled, even chopped, shredded or grated, that is semi-processed -ready for consumption- is getting stronger due to reasons such as foodservice industry, cost, labor, and hygiene. For this reason, the fresh-cut fruit and vegetable sector has become the food sector with a rapid growth trend in recent years. The biggest problem in these products is the short shelf life after semi-finished product preparation processes and the deterioration in product quality during the sales process. Preservative solutions developed to protect the product quality are successful, however, the effects of these applications on fruit firmness cannot be measured accurately due to the deterioration of fruit integrity (slicing, chopping, grating, etc.) during product processing. In this study, it has been aimed to accurately determine the changes in fruit firmness during the preservation process of the fruits taken into the fresh-cut process by using specially developed apparatus (45, 60, 90° angled V-blocks assembly). The fruit integrity deteriorates due to the preservation of the fruit by slicing the fruits taken into the fresh-cut process; after this stage, the firmness measurement cannot be carried out stably in the analyses to be made for the change of the fruit quality. The blocks apparatus developed for this purpose can be used in order to more accurately determine the effects of the applications made for quality preservation in the process of storage and shelf life in fruits divided into 4-6-8 slices. In the study, the values obtained from the firmness measurements made with sliced fruits in apple, pear and quince species showed that the developed angled blocks apparatus gave more stable measurement values considering the standard deviation value and the variation created by the averages.