SOURCE: Madeleine Cuff, iNews
As the brunch ingredient of choice for millennials, supermarkets face a continuous battle keeping their shelves stocked with perfectly ripe avocados.
Customers demand ready to eat fruit, but avocados have a short shelf life, swinging from hard to mushy within just a few days.
Suppliers, supermarkets and customers are forced to keep squeezing fruit to see if it is ripe, but that causes bruising. Around one third of all avocados go to waste, in large part because of over-zealous squeezing.
But scientists at Cranfield University believe they have found a way to side-step the avocado guessing game. They have designed a new testing system using lasers and vibrations to assess an avocado’s readiness without damaging the fruit.
This could cut waste by up to 10 per cent and help ensure shoppers get a perfect avocado every time, they said. “Hard fruits create a higher frequency than soft fruits, so we calculated the perfect frequency for a ripe avocado and accurately measured this with a Laser Doppler vibrometry (LDV) test,” said Professor Leon Terry, director of environment and agrifood at Cranfield University.
Commercial potential
The technology could be used on other fruits, but it will work particularly well within the avocado supply chain. That is because these expensive fruits are laid out in single file on factory lines, making them easy to test.
“If developed, a simple ‘traffic light’ system could sort the fruit into those that are ripe, for discard or for storage, helping industry tackle food waste at this point in the supply chain,” research fellow Dr Sandra Landahl explained.
Slashing food waste is a quick way to cut costs and carbon emissions. In the UK, food waste from the supply chain and households is responsible for about 20 million tonnes of emissions each year, the equivalent of keeping seven million cars on the road.