Fruit and Vegetables Essay Example

Fruit and Vegetables Essay Give your views on the in-store retailing of fruit and vegetables taking into account the high perishability and competitive pricing for F amp; V, in organised sector retail stores/formats such as Reliance Fresh (Reliance Retail), Food World (Dairy Farm)and More in Indian metro cities? Storage of fruit and vegetables The storage of fruits and vegetables in a store is to extend the life. Storage helps in reducing biochemical change in fresh Famp;V. Cold storage slows down the growth of contaminating micro organisms. After harvest season they can achieve higher sale. Controlled atmosphere in cold store: To extend the life of crop cold, stores reduces the level of oxygen in the atmosphere. It slows down spoiling of F amp; V and also destroys insects. More over different type of crops require different atmospheres for good storage. They need to be independently assessed. In some fruits and vegetables off-flavor or discoloration can occurs, if oxygen concentration is too low. The store has to be fully used, so the cost of maintenance has to be optimized. The cost of setting up a controlled atmosphere store and the cost of monitoring the gas composition are both high. We will write a custom essay sample on Fruit and Vegetables specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on Fruit and Vegetables specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on Fruit and Vegetables specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer Completion required by different crops, and there may be competition from production areas that have the different harvest season. Cold storages causes little change to quality or nutritional value. Over long time storage, incorrect temperature and damage to crops can significant changes, including browning and weight loss due to evaporation of water from crops. Loss of vitamin C in fruit and vegetables depend on temperature management after harvest. For leafy vegetables losses are also accelerated by bruising and other injuries and by excessive trimming. Crops for cold storage: Most crops are likely to contain contaminants, to have parts that are inedible, or to have variable shape or size. To have uniformly high quality for sale in the fresh market sector, it is necessary to clean, sort and grade the crop before cooling and cold storage. It is important to remove ‘field heat’ from crops as quickly as possible after harvest. Before crops are placed in cold storage field heat reduces their metabolic activity, reduces the growth of bacteria and other losses like water and weight. It also reduces the lode on cold store refrigeration system. A simple method is to pick the either early in morning when it is cool or late in the evening and leave it to cool overnight. Hydrocooling is used to rapidly cool produce. Vegetables and fruits are sprayed with or submerged in chilled water produced by a refrigeration unit. Ice can be used to make cold water, when they are transporting. Many fruit products are packed in to wooden crates, mesh bags or perforated metal bin that are stacked on pallets to cause water to flow through. Fruit and vegetables are not damaged during harvest time. Crops should be harvested carefully using a sharp stainless steel blade and should not be placed on the ground where they could pick up dirt. Crops should be handled carefully and as little as possible. The best option is to prepare crops in the field and place them carefully in the containers that are also used in the cold store. This reduces the amount of handling and keeps damage to a minimum. Dirty crops can introduce insects, pests and moulds into the cold store, which will then damage good quality. ome fruit and vegetables should have their outer leaves removed before sale. Depending n the requirements of customers, it may also be to grade crops so that Fruit and vegetables that have similar size, maturity or color are together. Soaking is used for cleaning heavily contaminated root crops to remove soil and stones. For delicate foods such as strawberries or asparagus, or products that can trap dirt internally (e. g. cele ry), air can be ‘sparged’ through the water to increase cleaning efficiency. Spray washing using drum washers or belt washers is used for many types of crops. Larger foods are rotated so that the whole surface is sprayed, and some equipment has brushes or flexible rubber discs that gently clean the food surfaces. Flotation washing exploits the difference in the density of foods to separate contaminants. Foods that float in water (especially fruits or root crops), are separated from contaminating soil, stones or rotten crops that sink. There are 4 different types of hydro coolers. 1 Batch hydro coolers have bins of produce loaded into an enclosure and hilled water is sprayed over the product, collected, re- cooled and recycled. 2 Conveyor hydro-cooling, pass containers of produce under a shower of chilled water a conveyor belt. However, because of the higher cost, this equipment must operate for long periods in a year to be economically justified. 3 in immersion hydro-coolers, crates of produce are by a submerged conveyor through a large chilled water. 4 truck hydro coolers, involves loading produce into an enclosed trailer and inserting perforated pipes above the load. These produce shower of chilled water, re-cooled and recycled. After cooling,pipes are removed and the produce is transported. There are many cooling equipment are available commercially. These are designed for high production rates and expensive. Operation of a cold store: Packing systems: To load and unload products easily and safely a packing system is required in store. Under this system a more complicated system using rack and trays. The store lay out needs to be simple and clearly understood by operators so that product can be loaded and removed easily and quickly. The products are moved easily when full of fruit and vegetables are in one shelf. To maintain the airflow around crates, a 60 cm gap should be left between the storeroom walls and the crates, and a 90 cm gap between the crates, the ceiling and the refrigeration unit design of crate that is suitable for cold stores. Temperature at shelf: Cold stores are cooled by circulation of cold air produced by refrigeration units. All cold stores should lower the temperature of crops as quickly as possible through the ‘warm zone’ 50 –gt; 10 °C. Where maximum growth of micro-organisms occurs. Not all foods can be chilled to low temperatures and some tropical, subtropical and temperate fruits suffer from ‘chilling injury’ at 3 10 °C. This causes a range of effects, including browning or discolouration, the development of off-flavours and excessive softening. The storage temperature always has to be above the minimum temperature and care is needed to set the store thermostat so that the cooling system does not produce any oscillation in temperature below the minimum temperature. It can be seen from Table 2 that there are basically three groups of fruit and vegetables: those stored at 0 4 °C; those stored at 4 8 °C; and those that require a storage temperature above 8 °C. For storage of mixed crops in a single cold store it is important that the crops should have similar temperature requirements. Pricing: The increase in the price of fruits and vegetables relative to less healthy foods could reduce consumers to purchase fruits and vegetables. Such a change in relative price and incentives has difficult to prove because of substantial quality improvement in many fresh fruit and vegetables. For commonly consumed fruit and vegetables for which quality has remained fairly constant, analysis of price tends reveals price decline to that of dessert and snack foods. this price trend evidence suggests that the price of a healthy dite has not changed relative to an unhealthy one, although a healthy diet might not include every fresh fruit or vegetable currently available. Price of partially prepared or ready to eat vegetables may be more expensive that unprepared vegetable. The price difference can be large as the value consumers assign to what otherwise be their own kitchen work. The added cost of washing, peeling, chopping, cutting , mixing and bagging is incurred by marketers lead to consumers in form of higher prices. Its also possible that costs for these services might rise at a different than costs for the agricultural commodity. For example : if the processing costs and other marketing services have risen faster than farm prices, it would follow tht retail prices may rise faster for value-added food than for more traditional fruit and vegetables. Relative prices have changed Consumers may value on the increased variety of food available as well as on the conveience of these foods. If we could net out the value of the improved quality, we hold quality constant and price comparisons. To remove the value of quality improvements from price comparisons, the price of the improved product would have to be adjusted down by the value consumer place of the improvement. Most of the price statistics do not incorporated the notion. Changes in price of many different foods is an alternative to examining price indices. our approach is to look at price of many foods that have not undergone substantial quality change. Foods considered for selection must have been commonly consumed in the 1980s. A long time series on the price of each food must also be available. Since we chose foods that we hope did not change much, we cannot extrapolate our results to all food prices. The food prices we examine are not representative of all food prices. However, results will point to whether relative prices have changed. BLS reports monthly retail prices going back to 1980 for many specific f oods, such as Red Delicious apples and broccoli. This report uses a subset of the U. S. city average price series. An attractive feature of these data is that BLS maintains each price series as long as its probability-based sampling generates sufficient observations to report prices reliably. With long time series, researchers can also see how relative prices have changed over time and how consumers’ ability and incentive to choose a healthy diet may have changed. Long time series reveal consumers’ changing ability and incentive to alter dietary quality without being confounded by unusual or unique, shortrun events (like a freeze in California’s Central Valley that leads to a temporary short supply of oranges and unusually high prices). There are many reasons why the price trends we examine might display different patterns than the price indices. First, even if we interpret trends in price indices as conclusive evidence that Americans pay more annually for fresh fruits and vegetables, that the index for fresh fruits and vegetables has been rising means only that many fresh fruit and vegetable prices have been rising. The rising index does not necessarily mean that prices for all fresh fruits and vegetables are rising equally. Like any average, the index is composed of a diverse set of movements. Second, we will be examining average price trends for foods with relatively less quality change than newer fresh fruit and vegetable products. More traditional foods embody a smaller quantity of marketing inputs than do the newer foods, which are likely to comprise a growing share of the CPI. Another factor may be that BLS accounts differently for changes in the economy, such as the mix of retail outlets at which consumers shop, when calculating price indices and average price data. Many analysts have argued that the growth of â€Å"big box† retailers, like Wal-Mart, has dampened infla-tionary price increases, but that effect is not fully incorporated in the CPI (see Reinsdorf, 1993; Leibtag, 2006). Using household purchase data, Leibtag (2006) shows that for a wide class of dairy foods, eggs, and butter/margarine, the CPI yielded larger estimates of price inflation than did average price data. In metro cities of India rapid ncrease of hostels, apartment, groceries, Eating outs, petro prices, transport, communications, shopping and other general stuffs are increasing more in these days. The cost of living of people is increasing day by day due to increase in food prices and other relative prices. Exports of food and vegetables in India is increasing more. Wholesale and retail profit and price varies in different metro cities of India. The demand for high value commodities particularly fruits, vegetables and milk would go up significantly during 2010 and 2 020 in India.