Storability Potentials of Selected Fruits in Evaporative Cooling Structure Using Different Locally Sourced Lagging Materials

The preservation of fresh fruits is a critical aspect of agricultural management, ensuring extended shelf life and maintaining product quality. Evaporative cooling structures (ECSs) have emerged as promising solutions for enhancing fruit storability by providing controlled environmental conditions conducive to prolonging freshness and minimizing post-harvest losses. This paper investigates the storage suitable ofECSs using locally available lagging materials.Jute fibre, stem sponge fibre and sponge gourd fibre were used as lagging materials. The ECSs were loaded with garden egg and sweet orange and were tested using the different lagging materials for a period of 14days.The fruits were loaded in another ECS without lagging which was used as control.The results indicate that the highest weight loss 6.09 and 20.63gwere obtained for sweet orange and garden egg respectively using sponge gourd fibre. Thisshows that the fruits losses weight faster using sponge gourd fibre.It was obtained that the firmness of both fruits were retained using stem sponge fibre and sponge gourd fibre while there was no significant changes in the fruits colour using jute fibre. Furthermore, the bacteria count for sweet orange and garden egg after the storage period was found to range from 2.98 x 102 cfu/g to 9.18 x 102 cfu/g respectively for each of the lagging material. Jute fibre was found to be the storability potential of the fruits.