The ‘Altes Land‘ is the biggest closed fruit growing area in Northern Europe. On about 10 000 hectares mostly pome and stone fruit is produced. The main cultivar are apples, with a harvest volume of more than three million tons. The Esteburg research station in Jork belongs to the chamber of agriculture and is the central contact point for tree fruit research in northern Germany. Read More
Over the past months the trace gas research group at Radboud University has built a mobile gas sensor system that intends to sample directly from the storage rooms. Their challenge is to get it operational 24/7 under industrial conditions. Read More
The Wageningen Food & Biobased Research institute has more than 25 years of experience in developing interactive storage systems for fruit and vegetables. These systems often work with parameters such as temperature, humidity, oxygen and carbon dioxide. Read More
Project partner Cranfield University is working on the identification of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) produced by potato tubers during storage. The main objective of this study is to identify those VOCs that are associated with potato rots, sprouting and sweetening, and could be used as indicators in an early detection system for storage management. Read More
In a dynamic workshop, the Flanders Centre of Postharvest Technology (VCBT) informed apple and pear growers on the latest developments in dynamic controlled atmosphere (DCA) storage. The workshop took place at the experimental station pcfruit in Sint Truiden, in the heart of the Belgian fruit growing area. Read More
CAMA is an important international research conference on controlled and modified atmosphere storage of fruit and vegetables. Last CAMA conference was organized in Warsaw, Poland. A delegation of VCBT and LWK presented a QCAP poster and reported the first results of their Conference pear storage experiments. Read More
The QCAP researchers are developing a new system to monitor the quality of fruits and vegetables during storage. There is a constant feedback loop with the sector via the Associate Partners. One of those partners is the Fresh Produce Centre, the trade association representing Dutch companies selling fruits and vegetables. Peter Verbaas, project manager of Food Safety and Supply Chain Quality Control, explains their role in the project and why QCAP is necessary for their members. Read More
“Storex is specialist in controlled atmosphere (CA), a technology successfully applied to extend storage and improve shelf life of fruits and vegetables." Read More
The QCAP consortium will develop a high tech gas detector and will validate it in a complete monitoring system. Read More
A significant part of the fruit and vegetable production gets lost during the post-harvest process. Innovation stakeholders from the North-Western part of Europe are now joining forces to develop an affordable tool that could help farmers monitor the quality of their products in real-time. The new tool will contain a next-generation gas detector, which can measure eight different gasses released by the products. The QCAP project strives towards completing a prototype in 2019. Read More
