| dc.description.abstract | Horticultural commodities, especially vegetables and fruits, have strategic roles in the national economy. The export value of horticultural commodities and their processed products has increased about 14.53 percent from USD 197,282,150.00 in the year of 2003 to USD 225,955,000.00 in the year of 2004. The great potential of the horticultural commodities, nevertheless, faces a number of problems, i.e. low quality of the product and its safety because of contamination of micro-organism, pesticides, and heavy metal particles. Improvement in fresh vegetable products can be made by the utilization of technology and proper intensive post-harvest handling. The post-harvest handling using the technique of rinsing, soaking, and spraying using sanitizer solution has been widely adopted to reduce the degree of the above-mentioned types of contamination. This study is aimed at inventing a proper technique in post-harvest handling that is implement able in farmer level, i.e. using technique of pre-consumption soaking with sanitizer solution. The sanitizer solution consists of sodium hypochlorite with 50-150 ppm concentration combined with acetic acid of 1-3% concentration. The effective sanitizer combination is determined using Response Surface Methodology (RSM). The result of the study at the laboratorium has shown that the sanitizer combination of 2 percent acetic acid and 100 ppm sodium hypochlorite in 4 minutes of interaction has resulted in high effectiveness in inactivating pathogen microbe using parameters of among others: the average inactivating rate of total number of bacteria is 5.92 log CFU/g, inactivating rate to E. coli is 5.46 log CFU/g, and Salmonella 5.90 log CFU/g. Another combination, which is 2.75 percent of acetic acid and 77 ppm sodium hypochlorite in 3.5 minutes of interaction has resulted in 3.32 percent of reducing effect on the pesticide residue. The use of those sanitizer combination in farmer level has brought into result, i.e. the average inactivation rate of total number of bacteria is 5.59 log CFU/g, and the reducing rate of pesticide residue is 24.61 percent in average. | id |
