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RetaileRs Have a Gas
as RipeninG pRoGRams BolsteR sales
Technology still evolving but options growing for retailers. BY MATT OGG
The likelihood of impulse purchases and the imperative of repeat buys make a strong case for pre-condi- tioning climacteric fruit — or in layman’s terms, fruit that continues
ripening after harvest with ethylene.
An avocado picked off the tree with the right dry matter — an indicator of oil content — will eventually ripen thanks to its own enzymatic activity that softens the flesh and
in varieties such as Hass, darkens the skin.
In the case of bananas, mangos, pears and a host of other crops, the produce’s own ethylene
hormones convert starch to sugar.
Few shoppers would care to learn this
science or have the patience to wait for it to play out, so offering ready-to-eat food is key for retailers wanting to encourage regular consumption habits.
This means they need to give many fruits a kick-start with natural ethylene gas to set the process in motion, whether it be done in-house, through a third-party provider or by fruit suppliers themselves.
“Customers buy with their eyes, but they return with their tastebuds,” says Dennis Kihl- stadius, owner of Produce Technical Services in Bemidji, MN. “The American retail industry is so worried about controlling shrink
that they forget about growing their sales by having a product that the customer will buy and come back to buy.”
Kihlstadius, a ripening consultant who has worked with a range of commodity boards over decades and teaches a course on the practice at the University of California-Davis each April, says there is still a lot of “tribal knowledge” in supermarkets when it comes to ripening.
He says this is partly because of confusing messages from suppliers and experts who present their ripening practices differently, but
it is also a force of habit.
For example, the hackneyed truism of
bananas giving off more ethylene than most fruits is completely untrue; avocados, pears and apples release more ethylene at room tempera- ture, says Kihlstadius.
“You can only ripen physiologically mature fruit — for example in mangos and avocados — and you have a lot of diversity of maturities in a given pallet,” he says. “You can actually create more shelf life by giving fruit ethylene because you allow it to ripen more uniformly and use less energy, because otherwise the fruit has to produce its own ethylene.”
Get the temperature wrong though, and all that careful work goes out the window. Add to that the challenge of produce delivery, and the industry’s need to perfect the ripening process is greater still.
“We’ve got this banana thing really figured out, but we don’t have the other commodities really dialed in yet,” he says.
Kihlstadius cites two pivotal moments in his career when the industry made drastic changes for the better; one was the ground- swell at retail that tomatoes ought not be refrigerated, and the other was avocado companies establishing regional ripening centers to “control their own destiny.”
PRODUCE BUSINESS / JUNE 2019 / 47