Physico-chemical changes related to quality of five strawberry fruit cultivars during cool-storage

Several parameters related to strawberry quality, such as texture, anthocyanin content, titratable acidity, pH, total ascorbic acid, and total soluble sugars, were evaluated over a week of cool storage. The results indicated that low temperature used to increase strawberry shelf-life could also induce small changes in some of the quality parameters studied. However, the data revealed the importance of the cultivar in question since there were some contrasting responses among the cultivars. Also the initial values for some of the parameters were clearly different, indicating that the cultivar is the most important factor for determining post-harvest quality and extended shelf-life. Texture is an important parameter with regard to shelf-life but was not determined since the 'Mazi' cultivar had a high initial value for texture but no changes occurred over the storage period. However, it had the shortest shelf-life. Changes in anthocyanin content were highly dependent on the cultivar. Except for 'Toyonoka,' no marked changes were observed in titratable acids or pH. Ascorbic acid decreased by 50% in all cultivars. The profiles of soluble sugars were different among cultivars but, for all of them, sucrose disappeared on day 2 of storage. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.