Comparison of Fruit Quality Characteristics of Berries

Abstract

Fruits including berries are one of the most important sources of our daily nutrition due to their major aspect from point of view of consumers. The fruit quality includes the internal and external properties. The internal quality mainly is determined by aroma, flavor, taste, texture, nutritional quality (soluble sugar content, starch, organic acids, soluble solids content, and carotenoids, total flavonoids, total phenolic, antioxidant activity), flesh firmness, diseases, and chemical residues, while the external quality mainly concerns the appearance, size and colour and bruises. How to measure berry fruit quality has always been one of the most attractive research hotspots in the food industry. For the present, most of the available investigative methods are still destructive, labor and time-consuming; besides, several methods require sample preparation, costly instruments and chemicals, which cannot be used for large-scale sample evaluation. With the increasing demands of real-time detection of fruit quality, non-destructive fruit evaluation methods have been greatly developed. However, problems like low detection accuracy and poor model adaptability remain in the non-destructive detection system. Thus, it is necessary to develop non-destructive, high-efficient, simple, accurate and low-labor-cost techniques for fruit quality determination. In this paper, a comparison of different and advanced analytical methods for assessing the fruit quality characteristics of berries was discussed.