South African group adds Harvista 1.3 SC tool to manage produce quality before and during harvest
Agrofresh has announced that South African apple specialist Fruitways has added its Harvista 1.3 SC tool, a near-harvest product, to its portfolio.
Fruitways has partnered with post-harvest specialist Agrofresh for more than 20 years, having integrated the Agrofresh SmartFresh Quality System into its operations to allow longer fruit storage and ensure export quality – especially to markets that were previously unavailable due to quality constraints.
With the addition of Harvista 1.3 SC, Fruitways said it had another tool to manage produce quality before and during harvest.
“Agrofresh is an important supplier partner for us,” said Jaco Moelich, Fruitways general manager – technical services. “Both Harvista and SmartFresh give us valuable tools to determine the timeframe that we want to harvest and when we want to pack the fruit for our clients.
”SmartFresh has really transformed the way we think about our post-harvest process and how we make decisions on storage and marketing of our fruit.
“The climate is not always ideal for good colour development, so you sometimes need a bit longer time on the tree for the cold fronts to come in the autumn time and Harvista gives us the opportunity to delay our harvest,” he continued.
”You get a bit bigger size, but you also get very good colour development if you can delay your harvest a little bit,” he added. “In post-harvest, the most important thing is texture and SmartFresh plays a very big role in maintaining a crisp texture during storage, long after apple harvest, for consumers.”
Peter Wood, country manager South Africa for Agrofresh, said it filled the group with pride that Fruitways and the apple industry had benefited from the research and investments his group had made.
“Collaborations like the one with Fruitways are the cornerstone of the success AgroFresh has had over decades in the industry,” he noted. ”We answer real quality and freshness challenges our customers face throughout the fresh produce supply chain.”
AgroFresh commercialised the SmartFresh Quality System products based on 1-MCP, beginning in 2003 with application for apples.
In the last 20 years, it has been expanded for use in multiple crops and new applications in field, storage and transit.
The group said that a focus on quality and freshness had driven the advancement of its solutions portfolio beyond ethylene management to include fungicides, coatings and digital platforms, including FreshCloud for quality inspection and in-room wireless monitoring with its Strella sensor.
“The SmartFresh Quality System has really transformed the way we think about our post-harvest process and how we make decisions on storage and marketing of our fruit. Going forward, I cannot really imagine how we would handle a process without this collaboration with AgroFresh,” said Moelich.
Click here to hear Jaco Moelich talk more about Fruitways’ partnership with Agrofresh
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