Practical Methods to Improve the Quality and Safety of FreshCut Fruits: A Review

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, 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. Another problem associated with the ready-to-eat products, is the microbiological growth. The metabolism of molds and yeasts is responsible for the qualitative decay of minimally processed fruits, so the products decontamination became essential. Natural antimicrobials, ozone, chlorine dioxide, UV and cold gas plasma are some of the different treatments proposed. In combination with these treatments, some actions are carried out to limit the oxidative browning and the firmness loss. Ascorbic acid is the compound most extensively used to avoid the oxidative browning of the fruits, however nowadays there are many alternatives, like chemical or physical treatments. The edible coatings could be effective systems to preserve fresh cut fruits quality, their actions are due to the barrier forming against external agents; in addiction, they could carry functional ingredients (antioxidant, antimicrobial, calcium salts). In conclusion, 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. This review describes the most significant contributions regarding preservation of fresh-cut fruits in order to evaluate their effectiveness in preserving quality traits.