10/26/06 Keeping it Fresh

Keeping it fresh. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. Consumers looking for fresh, ripe fruit browse their local grocery produce aisles with little knowledge that technology is help to create the best looking, juiciest tasting produce available. The secret is in knowing how a fruit ripens and the ability to halt the ripening process at the peak. Enter a new technology. John Fellman is a professor of Postharvest Physiology at Washington State University. FELLMAN: Commercially available chemical enacted at one part per million as a gas or less that they can lock apples up in a gas tight room and treat them with this for 12 hours and it stops all ripening related activity for a couple of weeks and if not months if they're placed in controlled atmosphere storage. The product is called SmartFresh. The key is controlling the production of ethylene, the natural hormone released by fruit causing to it age or ripen. What's the benefit? FELLMAN: You know for example if you take a Jonagold apple which one goes pretty mushy pretty fast in storage and you treat it with SmartFresh and you hold it for 6 months, it is just as crunchy as one would be one or two months under regular storage and so we have year round marketing because of this storage technology and this is just another wrench in the toolbox. Non-toxic, no residue and it extends the shelflife. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.