Postharvest and Quality Assurance

The Division Postharvest and Quality Assurance (DPHQ) includes a multidisciplinary activity aimed at preserving quality, ensuring safety, and minimizing loss from the moment of harvest to the point of consumption. This work is critical because horticultural products are highly perishable, metabolically active living tissues that continue to respire, ripen, and senesce after being picked. The primary goal of R&D in this area is to understand and control these biological and environmental factors to extend shelf life and deliver a product that meets consumer expectations.
R&D activities are centered on several key domains:

• Postharvest physiology and biochemistry: covering fundamental processes that cause deterioration (respiration rates, ethylene production and sensitivity, water loss, and the biochemical pathways that lead to changes in color, flavor, texture, and nutritional value) with the objective to identify the genetic and molecular markers associated with desirable traits,
• Pathology and food safety: focusing on identifying decay causing fungi and bacteria and developing effective, safe control strategies, which include biological control agents, physical treatments, and edible coatings that have antimicrobial properties, with increasing efforts on finding sustainable alternatives to chemical treatments,
• Technology and engineering: involves designing and optimizing temperature and atmosphere management (pre-cooling systems, controlled atmosphere and modified atmosphere packaging), non-destructive sensor technologies like near-infrared spectroscopy, hyperspectral imaging, electronic noses, smart and sustainable packaging.

In essence, postharvest R&D is a dynamic field that combines biology, chemistry, engineering, and data science to build a more resilient, efficient, and sustainable food supply chain, ensuring that the work done in the field translates into safe, nutritious, and high-quality food on the table.