Textural quality assessment for fresh fruits and vegetables

Academically, quantitative measurement of texture is essential for the study of the chemical and physiological mechanisms of texture. Commercially, quantitative measurement of texture is essential to ensure the quality of produce at packout. The diversity of tissues involved, the variety of attributes required to fully describe textural properties, and the changes in these attributes as the product ripens and senesces contribute to the complexity of texture measurement. Texture is a human assessment of the structural elements of a food. It is generally accepted that texture relates primarily to mechanical properties, so instrumental measurements relate mainly to mechanical properties. Fruits and vegetables exhibit viscoelastic behavior under mechanical loading, which means that the force, distance, and time involved in loading determine the value of any measurement. Because of their viscoelastic character, every effort should be made to hold the speed of the test constant in manual texture measurements and the rate of loading should be specified and controlled in mechanized measurements. There are many types of mechanical loading: puncture, compression, shearing, torsion (twisting), extrusion, crushing, tension, bending, vibration, and impact. The most widely used texture measurement for fruits and vegetables, after manual squeezing of course, is the Magness-Taylor fruit firmness test, which measures the maximum force to puncture the product in a specified way. The Kramer shear or shear-compression test is widely used in the processed foods industry, but is less commonly used by horticulturists. Nondestructive methods are highly desired both for sorting and for postharvest research. Compression tests of excised tissue pieces are frequently used in research. Nondestructive testing using impact, vibrational behavior, light scattering, and optical methods are being investigated but none has been widely accepted to date. Multiple instrumental measurements may be necessary to adequately the diversity of textural attributes sensed by the human consumer.