Design Guidelines for a Quality Assessment System of Fresh Fruits in Fruit Centers and Hypermarkets

When the fresh fruit reaches the final markets from the suppliers, its quality is not always as good as it should, either because it has been mishandled during transportation or because it lacks an adequate quality control at the producer level, before being shipped. This is why it is necessary for the final markets to establish their own quality assessment system if they want to ensure to their customers the quality they want to sell. In this work, commissioned by a multinational hypermarket enterprise, a system to control fruit quality at the last level of the distribution channel has been designed, after gathering information about the movement of commodities inside company and its requirements. The system combines rapid control techniques with laboratory equipment and statistical sampling protocols, to obtain a dynamic, objective process, which can substitute advantageously the quality control inspections carried out visually by human experts at the reception platform of most trade centers as the one studied. Portable measuring equipment have been chosen (firmness tester, temperature and humidity sensors...) as well as easy-to-use laboratory equipment (texturometer, colorimeter, refractometer...) combining them to control the most important fruit quality parameters (firmness, color, sugars, acids). A complete computer network has been outlined to control all the processes and store the collected data in real time, and to perform the computations. The sampling methods have been also defined to guarantee the confidence of the results. Some of the advantages of a quality assessment system as the proposed one are: the minimization of human subjectivity, the ability to use modern measuring techniques, and the possibility of using