Preservation of kiwifruit coated with an edible lm at ambient

temperature
Shiying Xu
a
, Xiufang Chen
a
, Da-Wen Sun
b,
*
a
School of Food Science and Engineering, Wuxi University of Light Industry, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214036, People's Republic of China
b
FRCFT, Department of Agricultural and Food Engineering, University College Dublin, National University of Ireland, Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2,
Ireland
Received 4 August 2000; accepted 13 December 2000
Abstract
With the permeability mathematical model of edible lm and analytic hierarchy process (AHP), four items including the per-
meability of oxygen (P
O
2
), carbon dioxide (P
CO
2
) and water vapour (WVP), and respiratory quotient (P
CO
2
=P
O
2
) of edible lm used
for kiwifruit preservation were evaluated comprehensively. The optimum edible lm composed of soybean protein isolate (SPI),
stearic acid (SA), and pullulan (Pul) was obtained and used to preserve kiwifruit. The result showed that the edible lm for coating
kiwifruit retarded the senescence process of fruit. The softening rates of kiwifruit coated with or without the edible lm were 29%
and 100%, respectively, in 37 days storage, thus the shelf life of kiwifruit coated with edible lm being extended to about
3 times. 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Edible lm; Permeability mathematical model; Analytic hierarchy process; AHP; Kiwifruit; Preservation
1. Introduction
Fresh fruits undergo vigorous biological reactions
after harvest and their respiration accelerates the natural
loss of fruit tissue. Therefore fruits tend to lose water at
room temperature, change appearance, texture and
quality and thus reduce the commercial value. Kiwifruit
rots more rapidly than other fruits due to its high ethylene
concentration in atmosphere and its sensitivity to ethyl-
ene. The latest storage technique for kiwifruits is to use a
modied atmosphere package with lowlevels of ethylene.
However, the main disadvantages of this method are high
cost and loss of quality due to the environmental change
when the fruits are transferred from the modied storage
environment to room temperature (Torres, 1994).
Coating fruits with edible lms is an eective storage
method at room temperature. The technique is similar to
simple fruit packaging. The thin lm for coating fruit
can inhibit gas exchange, control respiration rate, de-
crease nutrient loss, reduce water evaporation and pre-
vent microorganism growth that causes fruits rotting.
Lowings and Cutts (1982) proposed the coating of fresh
fruits and vegetables with a semi-permeable composite
lm comprising of the sodium salt of carboxymethyl-
celluose (CMC) and sucrose fatty acid esters. The CMC-
sucrose ester coating was later used to control internal
gas concentrations of green pre-climacteric banana
fruits (Banks, 1983, 1984) and Cox's Orange Pippin
apples (Smith & Stow, 1984). The sucrose polyester
coating was used for extending the shelf life of stored
`Golden Delicious' apples (Drake, Fellman, & Nelson,
1987). From these studies edible lms have proved to be
an eective preservation technique which can not only
keep fruit plumpness, fresh appearance and hardness
but also improve the lustre of fruit surface thereby in-
creasing fruit commercial value.
However, little research has been carried out for
preserving kiwifruit with edible lms. In the current
study, a composite edible lm for the preservation of
kiwifruit is developed.
2. Materials and methods
2.1. Kiwifruit samples
The kiwifruit was picked from a local orchard in
Xuzhou (Jiangsu, China) in October 1996. Twenty kg of
Journal of Food Engineering 50 (2001) 211216
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*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +353-1-716-7493; fax: +353-1-475-
2119.
E-mail address: dawen.sun@ucd.ie (D.-W. Sun).
0260-8774/01/$ - see front matter 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 2 6 0 - 8 7 7 4 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 2 2 - X
kiwifruit were transported in open boxes to Wuxi Uni-
versity of Light Industry and then placed in storage at
9C for 20 days. After that the kiwifruits were coated
with the emulsion formulated lms.
2.2. Film preparation
The solution of 3% soy protein isolate (SPI), 0.5%
pullulan (Pul) and 1% glycerol (Gly) were mixed with
water. Then 0.8% of melted stearic acid (SA) was added
to the SPIPulGly solution which was heated to 90C.
The mixture was emulsied using Ultra-Turrax T25
(Janke & Kunkel IKA-Labour technik) at 20,500 rpm
for 2 min. Vacuum was then applied to remove air
bubbles from the emulsion. The emulsion was poured
into a stainless steel plate to form a thin layer of 2 mm
thickness, which was dried at 85 5C for 4 h. All the
dried lms were peeled and stored in a desiccator (53%
RH) at room temperature for 48 h. A lab scale instru-
ment in stainless steel (Gilbert, 1986) was used to de-
termine the permeability of lm.
2.3. Permeability
Film permeability to oxygen and carbon dioxide was
measured by using gas chromatography (GC) according
to the procedure described by Gilbert (1986). When the
steady-state rate (DV =Dt) of gas transport through a lm
was obtained, the permeability coecient (P) was cal-
culated from the following equation:
P =
dDP
A
DV
Dt

: (1)
The conditions of GC were as follows:
Column: 3 6 m
2
GDX-502 packed column;
Detector: heat conduction cell detector with tempera-
ture of detector at 140C;
Temperature of column: 80C;
Temperature of injector: 90C;
Carrier gas: high purity nitrogen with pressure at
3 kg=cm
2
.
2.4. Film thickness
For each type of lm, three dierent sheets were
formed. For each sheet the thickness of the lm was
measured with a hand-held micrometer at 10 random
positions and the mean value was used.
2.5. Kiwifruit coating treatment
According to the optimum formulation of the edible
lm, the lm forming emulsion of 0.08% Pul, 0.165% SA
and 0.755% SPI mixed with water were prepared. The
kiwifruit were immersed in the lm forming emulsion
for 30 s. The coated kiwifruits were allowed to dry
overnight. After drying the emulsion coating of kiwifruit
became invisible. Then the coated kiwifruits were stored
at room temperature.
2.6. Hardness
The 1000S Material Testing Machine (Lloyd instru-
ments) was used to measure the hardness of the kiwi-
fruit. The load cell was 1 kN, the diameter of the
crosshead was 11.3 mm and the test speed used was 50
mm/min.
When the hardness of a kiwifruit was less than 10 N,
the kiwifruit was determined as soft fruit. The ratio of
the number of soft kiwifruits over the total number of
the kiwifruits used in the experiments was dened as the
softening rate.
2.7. Chemical measurements
Peroxidase (POD) activity (Whitaker, 1994), soluble
pectin (Robertson, 1979), titrable acid content (Pomer-
anz & Meloan, 1994), respiration rate ethylene volume
released (Avena-Bustillos, Krochta, & Saltveit, 1994)
were routinely determined.
2.8. Water vapour permeability (WVP) and soluble solids
WVP was measured by using ASTM E96-80 ``water
method'', also known as the cup method (ASTM,
1998). The soluble solids were measured using a re-
fractometer.
Notation
a, b, k parameters
A lm area
d lm thickness
P permeability or permeation coecient
DP gas pressure dierence between two sides of lm
r void diameter
T temperature
V
0
mean speed of gas molecule diusion
DV =Dt slope of the linear part in the dynamic curve at stable ow
y relative content of polysaccharide
z relative content of lipid
l molecular weight of permeating gas
k mean free distance of molecule
s lm tortuosity factor
e eective area percentage of lm permeation
212 S. Xu et al. / Journal of Food Engineering 50 (2001) 211216
3. Results and discussion
3.1. Permeability model of edible lm
The models for permeability of an edible lm were
usually divided into two types: microvoid model and
micropathway model (Krochta, 1990). The edible lm
used in the experiments consisted of hydrophilic mac-
romolecules and hydrophobic substances. When the lm
is dried, the ``particles'' formed by the hydrophobic
substances are dispersed in the hydrophilic lm matrix
to form a ne and continuous microvoids through which
the gas molecules could transfer. The surface structure
of the lm consisted of SPI, Pul and SA was also ob-
served by the scanning electron microscope (SEM)
(Chen, 1998). Therefore the microvoid model was used
in the current study.
With the microvoid model and Fick's law, the dy-
namic equation (Chen, 1998) for gas diusion that re-
ects the relationship between permeability and void
diameter of an edible lm can be derived as
P =
elkV
0
3skT
1

k
r

: (2)
As the permeability of a lm was aected by the com-
position of the lm, it is necessary to establish the re-
lationship between void diameter and lm composition
so that Eq. (2) could be used to predict the permeability
of a lm based on its composition. Therefore experi-
ments were also carried to determine the relationship
between the void diameter in Eq. (2) and lm compo-
sition.
Table 1 listed the eect of pullulan content on the
permeability for oxygen (P
O
2
). From Table 1 it could be
seen that when pullulan was added to a SPI based lm,
P
O
2
of the lm generally decreased because the void di-
ameter of the lm became smaller. This meant that the
void diameter was inversely proportional to the poly-
saccharide content.
Table 2 illustrated the eect of lipid content on void
diameter. The void diameter had a upper limit value
when SA was added to the SPI based lm (Gontard,
Duchez, Cuq, & Gilbert, 1994; Hagenmaier & Shaw,
1990) (Table 2). Therefore the mean void diameter in a
lm could be assumed to be
r =
k
ay (z b)
2
d
: (3)
Eqs. (2) and (3) could then be used to t the experi-
mental data on the proposed lm for kiwifruit. The t-
ting procedure was based on a non-linear regression
method available in the SAS software (Everitt, 1996).
The tted permeability mathematical models of the ed-
ible lm were as follows:
P
O
2
= 0:618y 1:127(z 0:0633)
2
0:00308; (4)
P
CO
2
= 0:398y 3:724(z 0:118)
2
0:0215; (5)
WVP = 12:905y 329:25(z 0:155)
2
9:193: (6)
Eqs. (4)(6) related the lm permeability with its com-
position and therefore could be used to predict the
permeability, based on which, dierent types of edible
lms could be developed for preserving various types of
fruits and vegetables.
3.2. Determination of edible lm components
In order to determine the optimum combination of
the lm components, the analytic hierarchy process
(AHP) (Saaty, 1990) was used, which is a multi-criteria
method for evaluating the importance of each compo-
nent of the lm. When fruits were coated with edible
lms, the gas composition of the fruit microenvironment
met the least requirement for fruit respiration, thus the
respiratory quotient of the fruits was equal to the ratio
of P
CO
2
and P
O
2
of the lm:
Respiratory quotient =
Concentration of CO
2
released
Concentration of O
2
released
= P
CO
2
=P
O
2
:
In the current study, four evaluation indexes, i.e., P
O
2
,
P
CO
2
, WVP and P
CO
2
=P
O
2
, were used. The ideal P
O
2
, P
CO
2
,
WVP and P
CO
2
=P
O
2
of the edible lm were assumed to be
a; b; c and d, respectively. The standard values for a; b; c
and d are listed in Table 3 (Brown & Tuwiner, 1962;
Chen, 1998). The criteria for the analytic hierarchy
process was as follows:
Criterion 1. The similarity between P
O
2
of the lm and
the ideal P
O
2
was [a P
O
2
[=P
O
2
.
Criterion 2. The similarity between P
CO
2
of the lm
and the ideal P
CO
2
was [b P
CO
2
[=P
CO
2
.
Criterion 3. The similarity between WVP of the lm
and the ideal WVP was [c WVP[=WVP.
Table 2
Eect of lipid content on lm permeability for oxygen (P
O
2
) and carbon
dioxide (P
CO
2
)
SA:SPI
(%, w/w)
P
O
2
(ml lm=m
2
day kPa)
P
CO
2
(ml lm=m
2
day kPa)
23.3 0.431 (0.009) 0.590 (0.008)
26.7 0.752 (0.011) 0.817 (0.014)
30.0 0.267 (0.005) 0.298 (0.009)
Table 1
Eect of pullulan content on permeability for oxygen (P
O2
)
Pullulan content (%) P
O2
(ml lm=m
2
day kPa)
0 0.46 (0.04)
0.3 1.58 (0.13)
0.5 0.88 (0.09)
S. Xu et al. / Journal of Food Engineering 50 (2001) 211216 213
Criterion 4. The similarity between P
CO
2
=P
O
2
of the
lm and the ideal P
CO
2
=P
O
2
was [d (P
CO
2
=P
O
2
)[=
(P
CO
2
=P
O
2
).
Based on the above evaluation indexes, the contents of
pullulan and SA were determined as 0.080.09% and
0.1550.165%, respectively. The permeability of the
lms with dierent contents of pullulan and SA could be
calculated with Eqs. (4)(6) and the results were shown
in Table 4. It could be seen that the weighting factor of
No. 3 composition was highest, which meant that the
lm permeability of No. 3 composition was the closest
to the ideal value. Therefore No. 3 composition was the
optimum formulation which was Pul:SA:SPI =
0.08:0.165:0.755 and the optimum edible lm made by
this formulation was used to preserve kiwifruits.
3.3. Preservation of kiwifruits coated with the optimum
edible lm
Kiwifruit respiration belonged to a mutating type.
Fig. 1 showed that signicant peaks existed in the fruit
respiration rate at dierent storage times. Compared
with the control, the respiration peak of the coated ki-
wifruit was delayed. Similarly, the curves of ethylene
release at dierent storage times have the same trend.
Respiration rate was closely related to the volume of
ethylene release. From Fig. 1, it could be seen that the
peak of ethylene release always emerged no later than
the peak of respiration rate. Kiwifruits with and without
edible lms showed a signicant dierence in the volume
of ethylene release. The volume of ethylene release of the
control was 34 times that of the coated one. Both the
reduction of the volume of ethylene release and the de-
lay in the releasing time for the coated kiwifruits showed
that coating with edible lms could retard the process of
senescence. Coating could also control the exchange of
gas between the microenvironment around the fruit and
outside environment, modify the gas components in the
microenvironment and inhibit the respiration of fruit,
thus preserve the fruits.
Fig. 2 compared the POD activity of the coated fruit
with that of the control. The curve for POD activity
during storage of the coated kiwifruit showed two
peaks, which occurred later than for the control. The
change of POD activity of fruits was related to the
volume of ethylene release. Before releasing ethylene,
the activity of POD increased. It thus certied that POD
activity was related to auto-catalytic synthesis of ethyl-
ene. This also indicated that POD activity was directly
related to the process of fruit senescence.
The comparisons of the content of soluble pectin and
hardness of the coated fruit to the control were shown in
Fig. 3. It could be seen that the content of soluble pectin
increases with storage time, but comparatively the sol-
uble pectin content of the control increased more rap-
idly. Therefore the gas components of the
Table 4
Film permeability with dierent contents of polysaccharide and lipid
Test y (%) z (%) P
O
2
P
CO
2
WVP P
CO
2
=P
O
2
Weighting
factor
1 0.080 0.155 0.4188 0.2354 0.9375 0.773519 0.090955
2 0.080 0.160 0.3544 0.1710 0.9363 0.664038 0.105800
3 0.080 0.165 0.2865 0.0984 0.9333 0.472553 0.313364
4 0.085 0.155 0.4696 0.3233 0.9301 0.946952 0.069786
5 0.085 0.160 0.4052 0.2588 0.9289 0.878780 0.120994
6 0.085 0.165 0.3374 0.1862 0.9259 0.759333 0.085060
7 0.090 0.155 0.5205 0.4111 0.9226 1.086480 0.061339
8 0.090 0.160 0.4561 0.3467 0.9215 1.045610 0.062149
9 0.090 0.165 0.3883 0.2740 0.9185 0.970953 0.090553
Fig. 1. Changes of respiration rate and ethylene released during stor-
age.
Table 3
Standard values of various criteria
a (P
O2
) b (P
CO2
) c (WVP) d (P
CO2
=P
O2
)
14.0 6.0 0 0.4
214 S. Xu et al. / Journal of Food Engineering 50 (2001) 211216
microenvironment could be changed by coating the fruit
with edible lms. From Fig. 3, the hardness of both the
coated fruit and control decreased with increasing
storage time. The decrease in hardness and the increase
in soluble pectin content of the fruit showed that the
decomposition of protopectin was the main reason for
the softening of the kiwifruit.
Fig. 4 illustrated the titrable acid contents of the
coated fruit as compared with the control. The curves
in Fig. 4 showed that the titrable acid contents for
both fruits with and without coating increased with
increasing storage time at the early stage. However, at
the later stage of the storage, the titrable acid content
of the coated fruit decreased slowly, whereas, that of
the control re-increased after a temporary period of
decrease. At the same time, it was observed that un-
like the coated fruits, rotting and fermenting occurred
for the fruits without coating at the end of the stor-
age.
Fig. 5 showed that the changes in content of soluble
solids for both coated fruit and control were not sig-
nicant during the period of storage. However, at the
nal stage of the storage, the soluble solids content of
the control decreased obviously. This was due to the
non-oxygen respiration of the fruits during senescence.
Table 5 compared the weight loss of the coated fruit
with the control after 54 days of storage. The weight loss
of the coated fruit was obviously lower than that of the
control. Therefore fruits coated with edible lms could
eectively inhibit water evaporation, thus decreased
weight loss and preserve the fruit. The softening rates
Fig. 4. Changes of titrable acid during storage.
Fig. 5. Changes of soluble solids during storage.
Fig. 3. Changes of hardness and soluble pectin during storage.
Fig. 2. Changes of POD activity and ethylene released during storage.
S. Xu et al. / Journal of Food Engineering 50 (2001) 211216 215
for the coated fruit and the control were also compared
in Table 5. It could be seen that after 37 days of storage,
the softening rate for the control was 100%. This meant
that the control had lost its commercial value completely
after 37 days of storage. However, the softening rate for
the coated fruit was only 29% as indicated in Table 5.
4. Conclusions
With the permeability model of the edible lm and
analytic hierarchy process, the evaluation of the edible
lms with various compositions was carried out based
on P
O
2
, P
CO
2
, WVP, and P
CO
2
=P
O
2
values and the opti-
mum formula to preserve kiwifruit was determined as
Pul:SA:SPI =0.08:0.165:0.755.
The edible lm composed of the optimum formula
was used to preserve kiwifruit at room temperature. The
experiments showed that the shelf life of the coated ki-
wifruit was extended about 3 times as compared with the
control. This result indicates that the permeability
model can describe the permeability of edible lms well.
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Table 5
Changes in the weight loss and softening rate of fruits in 54 days of storage
a
Fruit Coated fruit Control
Weight loss (%) 6.48 (0.37)
++
8.26 (1.73)
20 d 10 42
Percentage of softened fruits (%) 37 d 29 100
54 d 48
a
Note. The dierence between the coated fruit and the control was tested with t test. If t > t
0:005
, the dierence is very signicant (**); if t > t
0:01
, the
dierence is signicant (*). Storage conditions: room temperature at 15 5C and RH at 50%10%.
216 S. Xu et al. / Journal of Food Engineering 50 (2001) 211216