Zeitschrift für Ernährung und Lebensmittelwissenschaften
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Review on Challenge and Post-Harvest Handiling Consideration for Fruits and Vegetables

Gemechu Warkina Lencho*

Fruits and vegetables are crucially important because they contain good nutrients and bioactive components that keep the body healthy and control disease. However, the main challenges of fruit and vegetable include stress physiology, quality management, marketing, and food safety. Any postharvest handling technique used to keep harvested crops fresh for an extended period of time causes some stress to that tissue. Temperature extremes, desiccation, microbial invasion, gaseous atmosphere, light, and mechanical handling can all induce stress in a harvested fruit or vegetable. Furthermore, certain fruits and vegetables are susceptible to disorders, such as chilling, freezing, and CO₂ injury. Quality assurance is an integral part of most manufacturing industries, including food processing. There is less motivation to develop quality management programs for fresh produce than for other food items, partly because of the generic nature of produce marketing and the difficulty of applying principles developed for processed foods to living respiring tissue. Fresh produce is a major profit center for supermarket food chains. The growing demand for fresh fruits and vegetables by health-conscious consumers also results in increased concern about food safety. It is not clear how much pesticide use can be reduced without loss of visual quality of fresh fruits and vegetables, nor is it clear how lower visual quality would affect consumption. Therefore, this review updates information on the challenges in postharvest handling fruit and vegetable that affect the final consumer acceptability.