United Fresh Webinar

Jeff Brandenburg will be speaking on produce perishability and tools to optimize. The webinar is April 20th@2pm EDT. Details and sign-up link below:

United Fresh Produce Association

Given the perishability of many produce items, opportunities to extend shelf life are highly desirable. Join us April 20 for our webinar, Optimizing Produce Quality & Shelf Life: Approaches and Experiences, to explore the factors that affect shelf life, and the tools available to optimize product. Also, you’ll learn the approaches that produce companies took to solve specific perishability issues. https://hubs.li/H0KHKhF0

Webinar speakers:
• Rachel Atkinson- Leach ✔ Category Management Leader, Director of Category and Brand Management, RPE, Inc
• Jeffrey Brandenburg, President, The JSB Group, LLC
• Michael Muzyk, President, Baldor Specialty Foods, Inc., & Chairman of United Fresh’s Board of Directors

Thank you to Ecolab for their support in sponsoring the webinar!

#foodsafety #freshproduce

New services of the QFresh Lab

We have recently purchased a tabletop lidding machine, the T100 from MULTIVAC.  

This equipment expands our capabilities and allows us to perform lidded clamshell shelf-life tests on your produce with a perforation pattern designed to optimize shelf-life.  This machinery also allows for us to utilize active modified atmosphere, where we can gas flush the clamshell at time of pack to extend shelf-life of sensitive items.

We are excited about these new capabilities and the opportunity to improve quality for our customers.

QfreshLAB Notes

From the desk of the QfreshLAB Team—

The importance of quantifying respiration rate (RR):

 The QfreshLAB can measure and quantify the respiration of your products at different temperatures and under differing levels of abuse and stress. This allows us to map respiration rate changes under differing conditions.  If fresh produce modified atmosphere packaging (MAP), design is attempted and respiration has not been quantified, then shelf life will not be optimized!

After quantifying respiration rate with several different scenarios, we can design a package to optimize shelf-life. The image below shows a comparison of respiration rate and shelf-life between different types of popular produce found in the market.

The higher the respiration rate, in combination with extended shelf, life the greater the need  for optimally designed MAP.