How Fruit Quality Monitoring Improves Sustainability and Reduces Food Loss

• Fruit quality monitoring is an integral part of the fresh produce supply chain.
• Fruit quality monitoring improves productivity and reduces food loss on farm and postharvest stages to enhance food security and responsible production.
• The environmental impacts indirectly through quality monitoring are reduced carbon footprint, less water resource depletion and pollution, and better biodiversity protection on land.

To sustain the fresh produce supply chain, stakeholders must address challenges like limited land and water resources, soil degradation, climate change, and pollution. As the human population rises and food production increases, the negative impact of food production must be curtailed. Supplying fresh produce, a crucial part of the diet for mitigating global hunger and malnutrition, has additional challenges due to the perishability of fruits and vegetables. Fruit quality monitoring throughout the supply chain is one of the many proposed solutions that have been advocated to solve these problems.

Recognizing Sustainability Challenges

Figure 1: Food production’s SDGs and negative environmental impact. (Image credits: https://www.genevaenvironmentnetwork.org/resources/updates/food-systems-and-the-environment/9

The best way to define and evaluate sustainability in food production is to use the sustainable development goals (SDGs) formulated by the United Nations (UN) in 2015. The 17 SDGs aim to achieve economic, social, and ecological security for all people in current and future generations.

Food sustainability and SDGs relevant to fresh production supply chains have two aspects, summarized in Figure 1.

The first is sustaining and growing our ability to produce food to feed current and future populations. Fresh produce is a crucial part of the diet for mitigating global hunger and malnutrition, as it is a rich source of essential nutraceuticals like vitamins, anthocyanins, minerals, etc. Low daily fruit intake below 200–300 g has been identified as one of the three top dietary risks leading to mortality. These aims relate to SDGs 2, 9, and 12.

The second is minimizing the negative impact that food production has on the environment. These include the destruction of biodiversity on land, degradation of soil, significant carbon emissions, excessive water exploitation, and water pollution. These aspects pertain to SDGs 13, 14, and 15.

Sustainable production of fresh produce must address these six SDGs.

Considering the variety of challenges, it is clear that no single measure will be enough to make food production sustainable. Farm farms and retailers can use fresh produce quality monitoring to help achieve sustainability.

Quality Control and Sustainability

Consumers evaluate the quality parameters of fresh produce, including appearance, aroma, texture, safety, and nutrition. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRs)- based devices can monitor several quality parameters.

Start at the Farm

More than half (57%) of the fresh produce grown is lost in US farms. The fresh produce left in fields because it is inedible due to uneven ripening is 34.18%. This loss can be prevented or reduced by quality monitoring.

NIR devices that measure quality- external and internal color, soluble solid contents, dry matter content, and acidity can precisely identify maturity, improving the quality and yield of harvested fresh produce in three ways:

1. Improve growing conditions: Helps farm management improve growing conditions to achieve the best quality parameters.
2. Fix the correct harvest time: Climacteric fruits must be harvested when fully mature to develop taste, aroma, texture, and color to meet consumer requirements. Non-climacteric fruits must be ripe and can grow no further after plucking. Judging maturity precisely with color charts or using personal judgment is challenging, as external quality parameters differ by cultivar or agricultural practices.
3. Extend transport and storage: Quality monitoring can ensure harvesting as early as possible with the help of spectrometers.

Postharvest Stages

Fruits and vegetables are highly perishable because of their high water content and postharvest continuation of several physiological processes such as respiration, transpiration, ripening, and senescence. These processes can spoil fruit quality if they are not controlled through proper sorting, packaging, storage, and transport conditions.

Quality monitoring can help in the postharvest stages in several ways.

• Sorting: Fruits are sorted several times, starting at the farm based on maturity or ripening. It makes deciding batches for the fresh fruit market or processing easier and prevents spoilage due to ethylene production.
• Limiting spoilage: Quality monitoring helps in the early identification and culling of spoilt fresh produce during sorting, grading, ripening, storage, transport, and retailing.
• Determine atmospheric conditions: Maturity is vital in deciding atmospheric conditions and the duration of ripening.
• Monitor packed food: Entire and cut fresh produce quality can be monitored using NIRs devices to cull spoilt products in packages during storage, transport, and retailing.

Postharvest quality monitoring ensures quality maintenance, optimum and even ripening, and reduction in food loss.

How Quality Monitoring Enhances Sustainability

Quality monitoring helps sustainability by helping to achieve the targets set for the six SDGs as follows:

SDG 2- Zero Hunger: Achieve food security and improve nutrition to end hunger through sustainable agriculture. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that up to 811 million people suffered hunger in 2020.

It is possible to improve land yield using the current resources. Quality monitoring helps optimize the farm’s growing conditions and harvest date to increase yield amounts and improve fresh produce quality to avoid or minimize rejection. Also, the food loss of 34.18% inedible fruits in developed countries can be reduced.

SDG-9- Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure: Use scientific research to upgrade industrial technology and make supply chain infrastructure like warehouses, ripening rooms, and MAP more reliable and sustainable.

Quality monitoring through advanced technology, such as NIR devices in the postharvest stages, improves supply chain infrastructure efficiency to increase fresh produce value and reduce food loss. Moreover, researchers use NIR spectrometers to help them choose varieties adapted to changing climates, develop new graft orchard designs, and suggest optimum horticulture practices.

SDG 12—Responsible consumption and production: Stakeholders in the entire fresh produce supply chain must make production sustainable by reducing material consumption, avoiding the use of chemicals, and minimizing food loss.

Quality monitoring increases resource efficiency by increasing yield and quality. It prevents using additional land, water, chemicals, storage, or transport to bring more fresh produce to consumers. Food loss in the supply chain is reduced by ensuring quality is improved and maintained from the farm to retailers.

SDG 13- Climate action: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030 and by 2050 to net zero by reducing food loss, minimizing fossil fuel use for machinery,  and using organic agriculture methods.

Increasing productivity and cutting food loss in the entire fresh produce supply chain through quality monitoring that reduces new demand indirectly lowers carbon emissions from land conversion, farms, storage, transport, and processing. It reduces production needs or generates more carbon from fossil use for machinery, transport, energy storage, or nitrogen fertilizers.

SDG 14—Life below water: Reduce nutrient pollution of inland water bodies and oceans, which causes the death of other aquatic plants and animals. Minimize water consumption for irrigation.

Reducing food loss and increasing fresh produce yields in the entire supply chain indirectly relieves water resource pressure. Around 70% of water is already used for irrigation, and the finite resource is needed for other uses. Research using fruity quality and yield as an indicator to increase the water use efficiency of cultivars and orchards can also help. Lower use of fertilizers due to less food loss also reduces water pollution.

SDG 15- Life on land: Reduce biodiversity loss due to deforestation, excessive use of pesticides and herbicides that kill plants and animals feeding on contaminated food, and degradation of soil ecosystems through farm operations.

Improved productivity and reduced food loss can reduce the acreage of forests cut to make new farms and orchards. Reduced deforestation between 2000 and 2018 decreased carbon emissions from agriculture by 4%. Developing orchard design and farm operations that use less fertilizer limits soil biodiversity loss.

Improved productivity and reduced food loss increase the income of growers and other stakeholders. According to the World Bank, agriculture accounts for 4-25% of the GDP, with its share being higher in least developing countries. Any agricultural improvement can increase income by 2-4 times among the poorest compared to other industrial sectors. This could help meet SDG 1, which targets ending poverty for all people.

Tools For Quality Monitoring

Fresh produce quality monitoring for sustainable production must be non-destructive, rapid, and precise. These tools must be simple enough for use by untrained people in the field and onsite and provide easy-to-understand results to advise corrective or proactive actions. Felix Instruments Applied Food Science offers NIR devices that meet these requirements and are as follows:

• F-750 Produce Quality Meter
• F-751 Avocado Quality Meter
• F-751 Mango Quality Meter
• F-751 Kiwifruit Quality Meter
• F-751 Melon Quality Meter

Felix Quality Meters are industry standards scientists, and stakeholders use to make the fresh produce supply chain sustainable by improving conditions from farms to retail outlets.

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Alam, A.U.; Rathi, P.; Beshai, H.; Sarabha, G.K.; Deen, M.J. Fruit Quality Monitoring with Smart Packaging. Sensors 2021, 21, 1509. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21041509

 

de Castro Moura Duarte, A.L., Picanço Rodrigues, V. & Bonome Message Costa, L. (2024). The sustainability challenges of fresh food supply chains: an integrative framework. Environ Dev Sustain. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-024-04850-9

 

FAO (2020). Fruit and vegetables – your dietary essentials. The International Year of Fruits and Vegetables, 2021(background paper). https://doi.org/10.4060/cb2395en. Rome.

 

Frank, S., Havlík, P., Soussana, J. F., Levesque, A., Valin, H., Wollenberg, E., … & Obersteiner, M. (2017). Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture without compromising food security? Environmental Research Letters, 12(10), 105004.

 

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Wainwright, H., Jordan, C., Day, H. (2014). Environmental Impact of Production Horticulture. In: Dixon, G., Aldous, D. (eds) Horticulture: Plants for People and Places, Volume 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8578-5_15

 

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