Banana Grading Process.

Postharvest banana grading is an essential process that categorizes bananas based on their maturity index, ensuring quality control and facilitating efficient distribution in the market. The maturity index denotes the stage of ripeness reached by the fruit and is pivotal in determining its market value and shelf life.

Banana grading criteria primarily revolve around visual color stages indicative of maturity. These stages include dark green, light green, yellow-green, yellow with green tips, pure yellow, yellow with brown spots, and dark brown spots. Each stage reflects varying degrees of ripeness, affecting taste, texture, and shelf life.

Stage 1: Dark green
Stage 2: Light green
Stage 3: Yellow-green
Stage 4: Yellow with green tips
Stage 5: Yellow
Stage 6: Yellow with brown spots
Stage 7: Dark brown spots

The grading process involves meticulous visual inspection to identify the color stage accurately. Additionally, quantification of brown spots is crucial, as excessive spotting can render the fruit unmarketable due to consumer preferences for aesthetically pleasing bananas.

Marketability assessment hinges on distinguishing between marketable and unmarketable fruit. A predetermined threshold for brown spots is established to determine the fruit's suitability for sale, ensuring only high-quality bananas reach consumers. This meticulous grading process guarantees consumer satisfaction and enhances market efficiency by aligning supply with demand.
Banana Grading Process.

Shelf life of a product

The perception of quality of a product also depends on its form-fresh, frozen, canned or dried. Processing of fruits and vegetables extends the season of a perishable crop. Heat preservation (canning) provides a shelf-stable product, but usually at the cost of color, flavor, and texture. 

Better sensory quality is obtained in frozen foods but at a cost if increased energy requirement to maintain them, in a frozen state. Dried fruit products such as raisins and prunes offer very different attributes than their fresh counterparts. The consumer judges canned products with a different set of criteria than frozen or fresh items of the same commodity. 

Fresh fruits and vegetables are perishable, i.e., they have limited shelf life. They are living, respiring tissue that is also senescing and dying. Certain fruits such as bananas and tomatoes will ripen after harvest, developing desirable color, texture, and flavor during handling and storage. All other fruits and vegetables such as oranges, grapes, cucumbers, and carrots will show little or no improvement in quality within the postharvest system. 

Packing and handling systems have been developed to move the product from farm to consumer expeditiously to minimize quality degradation. Techniques used to extend shelf life of fresh products include 

Lowering the temperature to slow respiration and senescence 

Maintaining an optimal relative humidity to slow water loss without accelerating decay 

Adding chemical preservatives to halt physiological and microbial losses 

Maintaining an optimal gaseous environment to slow respiration and senescence

Longer shelf life can also be obtained by selecting cultivars that are more able to withstand the rigors of the handling system and by harvesting a crop at optimal maturity for storage and handling. 

Shelf life of a product