Kajian Teknik Penyimpanan dan Pengemasan Buah Stroberi (Fragaria chiloensis L.) Selama Transportasi

Abstract

Strawberry is one of the horticultural commodity that has a great potential to be developed commercially. Packaging is the most important method to keep strawberry still maintained in the best quality. Filler material that will be used to package the strawberry was studied in this research to maintain the fruits quality during transportation and storage. Oso grande strawberry cultivar is being used that have characteristics such as: very large size, dense fruit, the texture in the middle of fruit looks like the foam, and high yields. During transportation and storage the packages produce faces numerous hazards, these may be mechanical, environmental, or biological. Mechanical hazards can be defined as those caused by impact, vibration,compression and puncturing. This research studied how interaction the filler with fruits and kinds of compiling strawberry to keep the quality of strawberry fruits during simulation transportation. The purpose of this research are to determine the filling material quality that can maintain the quality of strawberry and to research the effect of mechanical damage on strawberry packaging filler material also to determine the effect of mechanical damage on strawberry. After the packaging, the strawberry fruits do simulation transportation with vibration table during 2 hours with the amplitude 3.63 cm and frekuensi 3.12 Hz. Then the strawberry fruits have storage at 10oC. The test method that being used are biological and mechanical damage testing, fruit weight loss, fruit hardness, and total solids that being dissolved. Fruit mechanical damage can be seen from the number of bruises along the outer side of strawberry fruit, then for biological damage can bee seen from white spotted that seems like fungi that come from strawberry fruit. Fruit hardness or sugar content inside the strawberry can be tested on upper side, middle side and bottom side of the strawberry. The results from the experiment can be concluded that by using styrofoam as material packaging with a horizontal position can maintain the quality of strawberry fruit rather than the other method.