PACKCHAIN

Cooling down fresh fruit and vegetables after harvest and keeping them cool during transport and storage is essential to preserve produce quality and extend shelf life. The overall research objective is to develop a new method to optimize ventilated packaging design for fresh produce.

An important share of the food losses, energy consumption and carbon footprint in the fresh fruit and vegetables supply chain is embedded within postharvest unit operations such as precooling, refrigerated transport and storage. Improving ventilated packaging is an efficient way to increase product quality and shelf life by better and more uniform cooling throughout the cold chain. Packaging also helps in reducing the energy use of mechanical ventilation systems by altering the airflow resistance. Many types are in use, such as closed and open-top cardboard boxes or reusable plastic boxes. A clear insight on the impact of the packaging type and its design on the environmental footprint of the fresh produce supply chain is however lacking. Our objective is to combine virtual tracking of individual fruit throughout the cold chain unit operations with life cycle assessment (LCA) as a novel approach to improve ventilated packaging, by reducing product losses and environmental impact. To this end, a virtual cold chain is set up for the case of citrus fruit. The hygro-thermal behaviour of individual fruit in boxes as stacked on a pallet is modelled throughout precooling facilities, transport in refrigerated containers and subsequent storage in cool rooms using computational-fluid-dynamics based models, but complemented by full-scale experiments. The resulting product quality, shelf life and losses but also energy consumption of each unit operation are fed into LCA to evaluate the supply chain in a more detailed way as possible by conventional LCA. Existing boxes as well as new designs are evaluated this way, specifically addressing the trade-offs between impacts from cooling, packaging and fruit losses. The developed methodology allows to tailor packaging to a specific cold chain in an environmentally-smart way. The strength of this project is that physical modelling of the quality state of single fruits is combined with decision-support tools to close the gap between package design and supply chain evaluation.