Enhancement of shelf life of malta fruit through active packaging

Active packaging of citrus fruits should be both encouraged at small industry level and farmers¿ level. The facility of cold storage is beyond the reach of marginal farmers; therefore, active packaging with the help of polythene and fungicide can be a good approach for enhancing the storage life of malta. However owing to its poor shelf-life, fruits can not be stored for longer period under ambient conditions and cannot be transported to distant places as this causes huge post harvest and economic loss. Therefore the effect of ethylene and CO2 scavenger, polythene thickness and fungicide treatment was checked on the quality and nutritional characteristics. The experiments were conducted for storage of malta. In this process parameters taken were scavenger amount (3, 4 and 5g) ), polythene thickness (75, 100 and 125 gauge)and fungicide concentration (100, 150 and 200 ppm). Hence active packaging was found a good way of storage of malta by maintain its quality such as weight loss ranged from 18.251 to 23.560 g, change in titrable acidity ranged from 0.588 to 0.96 %, ascorbic acid ranged from 57.92 to 67.58, TSS ranged from 10.8 to 12.2¿ Brix, microbial count ranged from 5.0E+5 to 9.