Carlos Crisosto - CE Postharvest Physiologist UC Davis
My program's focus is to reduce losses, improve fruit quality and safety, increase consumption, and expand markets. I work with fresh fruit and nut industries to identify and investigate arising issues, then creating and introducing new technologies as pilot programs with expansion, if needed. My approach is to develop short-term commercial solutions, while simultaneously pursuing the mid-term goal of better physiological understanding to support the long-term goal of plant improvement.
Consumer Quality Concept: Working closely with the UCD Department of Food Science and Technology, growers, shippers, retailers, and consumers we developed and validated Consumer Quality Concepts based on fruit physiology and consumer feedback for peaches and nectarines, plums, fresh figs, kiwifruit, mangos, blueberries, low-chilling cherries, and persimmon. We defined sensory and nutritional traits that satisfied consumers and determined how to achieve and maintain them from orchard to table. The major milestones were understanding commodity consumption barriers and problems, establishing consumer “drivers of liking”, and using these to define sensory quality categories for different measurements used previously. Then, we developed production and postharvest methods to increase the percentage of fruit deemed high-quality by consumers, for these categories.
Contributions to major regional crop: Peach sensory defects are triggered by temperature abuse during storage, retail, and consumer handling. In the short term, I screened cultivars based on market life potential and developed a practical ripening and ‘preconditioning’ protocol to reduce CI and extend postharvest life. To provide long-term solutions, we used collaborations to develop a molecular genetics approach to peach CI. Our group demonstrated that peach CI storage disorder was controlled genetically and as a result new commercial cultivars from multiple breeding programs are less susceptible to CI because of our worldwide team efforts.
Contributions to Minor Specialty Crops: My group has developed methods to improve production, reduce losses, and maintain quality of Asian pears, California apples, blueberry, cherry, fig, kiwifruit, dried plum, mango, persimmon, and pomegranate that have been adopted by those industries.
