Production Practices and Quality Assessment of Food Crops: Quality Handling and Evaluation

Product Description
An effective food quality assurance system is essential throughout during harvest and retail display to provide a consistently good quality supply of fresh food crops to the consumers and to protect the reputation of a given marketing label. This book covers various aspects of quality handling and assessment, including handling parameters, quality evaluation, CA and MAP storage conditions in a broad sense. It emphasises on developing better methods of monitoring quality and safety attributes of fresh produce as part of a quality assurance system and quality assessment and maintenance. To meet the changing demands for quality, availability, cost, appearance and service the actors in the supply chain need to cooperate. We have included eighteen chapters. They are: Enzymes and Quality Factors of Fruits and Vegetables; Volatile Flavours in Strawberries: A Description of The Components, and How to Analyse Them; Methods to Evaluate the Antioxidant Activity; Essential Oil Drugs-Terpene Composition of Aromatic Herbs; Fruit and Vegetables Harvesting Systems; Integral Handling of Banana; Economics and Organisation of Horticultural Postharvest; Production; Handling Machinery and Damage inflicted to the Product; Mechanical Damage During Fruit Post-Harvest Handling: Technical and Physiological Implications; Harvest and Postharvest Conditions for apples and Pears; Rapid quality evaluation techniques of horticultural crops; Table Grape Postharvest Management and Safety Issues; Fruit Postharvest Technology: Instrumental Measurement of Ripeness and Quality; Developmental Changes During Strawberry Fruit Ripening and Physico-Chemical Changes During Postharvest Storage; Processing of horticultural Crops in the Tropics; Quality Dynamics and Quality Assurance of Fresh Fruits and Vegetables in Pre- and Postharvest; Modification of Fruit Ripening by Genetic Transformation; Quality of Equilibrium Modified Atmosphere Packaged (EMAP) Fresh-Cut Vegetables. This book will be especially useful to researchers engaged in post harvest research, graduate and post-graduate students majoring in food sciences and researchers.