MACFrut meets MACView® preventing fruit-loss ! 13 April 2018
Food loss
Kiwi fruit in Europe: Italy ! A lot of these valuable kiwi fruit is stored for long term in high-tech postharvest storages with the purpose to deliver these fine kiwi fruit the whole year round to the consumer. Kiwi storage is difficult. It requires a good understanding of the product as well customer requirements. Despite these high-tech, high attention measures, in industrialized countries, 12% of all stored fruit in the postharvest process and logistic chain is lost ! EMS delivered a solution to reduces these losses in sensitive kiwi fruit.
Consumer expectation
For the consumer it is always of utmost importance that the quality of these kiwi fruit is at the top level. A product with less quality will harm the markt. It leaves behind a bad experience at the consumer, resulting at a subsequent purchase, in passing by the valuable kiwi product, left unattended on the shelves of the supermarket.
Risks
The kiwi fruit that is consumed can despite good workmanship, vary in quality, due to the fact this product is a product from mother nature. The variations in parties’ fruit require attention to discover the kiwi fruit that has a lower quality. A kiwi fruit that is aging produces a gaseous hormone, called ethylene that negatively affects the fruit, resulting in deteriation, softening, decrease of shape and color. Several bad fruits in a warehouse can affect a complete party stored in one room, do to the fact that the ethylene molecules from bad fruits attack the good fruits. Another scenario is that due to physical influences a party starts to produce ethylene gas molecules in an increasing amount, resulting in a catalytic behavior. If these example situations in warehouses occur, the complete batch of kiwi fruit is at risk of damage.
MACView® innovation at MACFrut presented
The MACView® analyzer is presented on the MACFrut at Rimini, Italy, country of kiwi fruit ! EMS developed and presented as first company in the world a high precision ethylene measurement device to monitor these very low ethylene concentrations inside postharvest storages for kiwi’s. The device is special designed for kiwi fruit. The system is high precise, portable, easy to use and maintain, data is global available by a wireless UMTS connection.
Test & applications
The device has the name MACView® Ethylene Postharvest Analyzer. The device measures extreme low concentrations (ppb range) of ethylene in fruit storages. In June 2018 a report from Wageningen University & Research was presented with the test results. Focus was that the product was compared and tested for use in kiwi storages (as reference) for extreme low concentrations. The results were excellent and showed that this instrument is applicable to use in postharvest storages for very sensitive fruit products like (but not limited to) kiwi fruit, even at extreme conditions such as low temperatures.
The world-wide well known kiwi fruit company Zespri tested the device in different applications and also acknowledge the advantages of the system in their applications of kiwi quality control. Devices are monitoring rooms in postharvest storages and logistics continuously and remotely send the data to the users. The process and protocol is harmonized resulting that all rooms can be compared easily.
As EMS we like to warm welcome you on the MACFrut in Italy !
See you there !
Jan-Kees Boerman
Managing Director
EMS B.V.
