Discovery and other early season apples
Control of post-harvest temperature is just one part of a package of measures that have been devised to regulate the supply of fruit to the market and to ensure that produce reaches the consumer with minimal loss of quality.
- It is necessary to harvest fruit at the correct stage of maturity and to ensure rapid removal of field heat.
- To obtain significant benefits fruit temperature must continue to be controlled during distribution of the fruit to the supermarket depot or wholesale market.
- The rate of softening can be more than halved by holding Discovery apples at 10oC rather than 20oC throughout a 10-day shelf-life period.
Cox’s Orange Pippin
- There was a lot of research done on the effects of post-storage temperature on Cox in order to address the problem of inconsistent eating quality in consignments of apples reaching the market.
- In particular the texture of the fruit was often inadequate to satisfy consumers with a known preference for firm, juicy apples.
- As in the case of Discovery apples, quality loss in Cox at 10oC was approximately half that at 18oC (Table 29). Quality was measured in terms of weight loss, background colour and firmness.
- A more complete account of the effects of temperature on post-storage quality changes in Cox is provided elsewhere.
Table 29 - Average losses (per day) in Cox quality after removal from CA storage
| Temp. (oC) | Weight loss (%) | Greenness (WFL chart units) | Firmness (N) (kg in brackets) | Days from 6.5 kg to 6 kg firmness (projected) |
| 3.5 | 0.02 | 0.02 | 0.28 (0.03) | 18 |
| 10 | 0.13 | 0.05 | 0.45 (0.05) | 11 |
| 18 | 0.31 | 0.10 | 0.71 (0.07) | 7 |