Minimal Fruit Processing

Fruit is the most popular food type in the world. Almost all people like to taste delouses, nutritionally rich, fresh fruits to maintain their healthy life and live a long time. However, most fruits are seasonal, giving their harvest quickly. Generally, farmers sell their harvest as raw products to the market, especially by the middlemen, with a low price margin. The common reason behind this situation is product quality. When they want to high profit margin, they should give additional value to their harvested products. In the market, high-quality products provide a high-profit margin. Thus, we can use this reality to implement novel agro-based entrepreneurs in the agricultural sector.

Minimal food processing is one of the most reliable techniques for using the most straightforward strategy to add value to fruits. Minimal food processing is a novel technology in the agriculture sector's post-harvest sector. Farmers and other innovators can apply this most straightforward technology to start a new agro-based industry. This article hopes to give basic ideas, knowledge, and skills to create this innovative technology you can use.

Basically, minimal fruit processing technology has a few steps such as presorting, cleaning, sorting, peeling the bark, slicing, pre-treatments, packaging, temporally storing up to move the market, transporting to the market, and marketing it.

Cleaning and pre-sorting.

The beginning step of minimal food processing is presorting and cleaning. The primary purpose is to remove damaged, disease-infected, and low-quality fruits and wash them fruits. Quality water can be used in cleaning; sometimes, disinfection materials can kill the germ touching fruits. After the cleaning process, the fruits keep in the drying area to remove the excess water. Now cleaned, high-quality fruits are available for the next steps.

 Peeling and slicing.

The pealing step should remove the outer layer of fruits, and then fruits should be cut into different slices based on consumer preference criteria. When slicing the fruits into small parts, many enzymatic and non-enzymatic chemical reactions occur, resulting in a discolouration or browning colour of fruits, which are difficult to sell in the marketplace due to low consumer attraction. Therefore, the best solution is pre-treatments using food-graded chemicals such as citric acid, SMS (Sodium Meta bi Sulphate), etc.

These fruit slices should be packed to move the marketing, generally consumer-friendly packaging techniques suitable for high selling and gain more profit in this industry.

Finally, this is a novel agro-based entrepreneurial opportunity for the farmers and other actors who engage in agriculture-related work. A creative mind makes a new product for society. Minimal fruit processing is also an innovative concept in the post-harvest sector globally and gives a new direction to the agriculture sector.

Entrepreneurship opportunity.

Minimal fruit processing is the refreshing pool of entrepreneurship to start a new agro-based industry to enhance life, especially for farmers in Small and Medium Scale (SME).