A key challenge for Zespri innovation leader and food science doctorate graduate Kylie Phillips is delivering fruit that will maintain its quality from harvest to the customer’s fruit bowl.
“The challenge around that starts within the orchard, at a vine architecture level, across the orchard itself and even across the region the orchard is in,” she said.
“That variation means not all fruit will store for the same length of time or necessarily for a long time.”
Lengthening fruit shelf life became more critical as volumes rise and the logistics of harvesting, packing and exporting higher volumes became more challenging.
The value in getting the right length of storage ability in kiwifruit was also measurable in revenue terms.
“From a grower’s point of view there is considerable added return to having fruit quality maintained.
“The industry faces tens of millions a year cost in quality losses and reducing that would deliver a return directly back to growers.”
Preserving and expanding distributor relationships would be increasingly vital with growing volumes and those relationships and the fruit’s premium value could be maintained only by ensuring the quality and consistency of fruit supplied throughout 100% of the season.
Meantime, consumer loyalty for repurchase relied on that fruit maintaining its quality when home in the fruit bowl.
Near-infrared (NIR) technology was an area Zespri was supporting as a means of determining fruit quality and was already in play in some of the industry’s more advanced pack houses.
Bay of Plenty based pack house technology company Compac incorporated NIR technology in its sorting equipment, combined with digital technology in EastPack’s new 14-lane Bravo sorter near Te Puke.
It was a $12.8 million installation comprising entirely New Zealand-developed sorting technology.
A key part of the plant’s technology was the use of Spectrim digital photographic technology that scanned and photographed every piece of fruit passing through the 14 lanes.
That amounted to a million photographs a minute being taken, with the ability to capture images in colour and two different infrared spectrums.
It measured four key quality parameters – fruit firmness, sugar levels, internal flesh colour and drymatter.
The technology enabled EastPack to identify the early-start fruit that could earn growers a significant bonus that otherwise might not have been identified in fruit on their orchard at harvest.
The non-invasive NIR technology projected light at produce using halogens and was transmitted, measured and analysed.
Comparison of the projected light with the returned light indicated how much had been absorbed. The measurements could be used to calculate grade values, determine internal properties and sort accordingly.
“One possibility is to use this technology to predict fruit’s storage quality but this is still in its early stages,” Phillips said.
Work was also being done at lab scale using NIR to predict storage outcomes for fruit, using machine learning algorithms.
The masses of metadata generated by scanning multiple items of fruit meant researchers could also ultimately predict a fruit’s storage potential.
Mathematical modelling of more than 30,000 items of fruit in three pack houses this year was also looking at segregating kiwifruit into short, medium or long storage potential.
Advances in software and computing capacity meant the complexities of environment, management practices and post-harvest treatment of fruit could also ultimately be included in predictive modelling.
Other areas of fruit quality were also being explored including chilling injury, now assessed by the human eye.
With new cultivars under development the challenges on fruit analysis were growing every year.
But, along with the volume growth, new cultivars brought their own unique attributes.
“Breeding programmes also incorporate a number of traits and storage is one that is included.”
Phillips said the industry also had access to a treasure-trove of data in some Green (Hayward) orchards that had been monitored for the past 10 years.
“We have information and data on them from bud break through to storage outcomes and we are now taking a deep dive into this data to look for relationships and correlations that we can learn from.”
Zespri’s policy to outsource its annual $25m spend on research and development had given it access to a broad range of skills from universities, private organisations and Crown research institutes.
“All this work revolves around focusing on value rather than volume alone with the ultimate aim being to deliver consumers a high-quality fruit experience.”
