Sistemi per prolungare la vita di scaffale di prodotti frutticoli di IV gamma

Minimal processing has been defined as a combination of procedures, such as washing, sorting, trimming, peeling and slicing or chopping, that does not affect the fresh-like quality of the food. The ready-to-eat fruit and vegetable market has rapidly grown in recent years due to the health benefits associated with these foods and to the increased health-consciousness of consumers with busy lifestyles and increased purchase power. Nevertheless, because the tissular integrity of fruits is more easily altered during processing, ready-to-use commodities are more perishable than the original materials. The main factors affecting the loss of consumer acceptability are discoloration, enzymatic browning, dryness and texture loss. These parameters determine the visual appearance of the fruits. For this reason, the fruit processing industry requires the development of techniques capable of keeping safe shelf life, preserving the original visual and organoleptic fresh-like characteristics of fresh-cut products. The treatments aimed to preserve minimally processed fruits quality could be chemical or physical, innovative or more established, cheap or expensive or they could require complex equipment. However, sometimes, effective treatments are not suitable because they are too expensive or complex or not natural. The review describes the most significant contributions regarding preservation of fresh-cut fruits in order to evaluate their effectiveness in preserving quality traits