Location: Citrus and Other Subtropical Products Research
Project Number: 6034-41430-007-013-N
Project Type: Non-Funded Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Apr 1, 2022
End Date: Sep 30, 2025
Objective:
WA-38 is a desirable apple cultivar, but tends to develop excessive greasiness and off flavor in storage. The project objectives are to:
1. Further define harvest maturity guidelines limiting greasiness of WA-38 in the cold chain.
2. Establish ethylene mitigation protocols that reduce WA-38 greasiness for both conventional and organic production.
3. Determine the limitations of wax/detergent to optimize wax in the post-storage cold chain.
4. Identify and determine protocols for mitigating off-flavors associated with greasiness.
Approach:
Peel greasiness can develop any time prior to and throughout the cold chain on many economically important cultivars, especially WA-38 (reducing greasiness is a FY 2022 priority). Besides diminished appearance, greasiness can be associated with off-flavors. Greasiness is influenced by weather during fruit development, harvest maturity, and storage temperature and atmosphere, and can be reduced by proper harvest and controlled atmosphere (CA) storage protocols and post-storage coatings. The extreme greasiness is purportedly directly or indirectly linked with off flavors likely resulting from the necessity to increase the wax layer to attempt to mitigate greasiness or a yet undetermined factor(s).
