Use of Edible Coating to Enhance Shelf Llife of Tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum L.)

Present experiment was conducted with an aim to study the effect of plant based edible coating to enhance the shelf life of tomato fruits maintaining its quality under minimal processing because rapid decay and moisture loss causes a huge post-harvest loss of tomato within a short period. Tomato fruits were coated with eight treatments comprising application of CaCl₂ 1%, Ethrel 0.1%, Na-alginate 1.5%, Na-Benzoate 0.1%, KMS 0.1%, Aloe vera extract and okra extract all supplemented with edible coating (EC) formulation (carboxymethyl cellulose 1%, ascorbic acid 0.5%, glycerin 0.2%, calcium chloride 0.2% along with chitosan 2%) and pH was adjusted to 4.0 with citric acid. The quality parameters like TSS, total sugars, reducing sugar, non-reducing sugar, vitamin C were improved continuously upto 15–20 days under refrigerated storage condition except untreated control and degraded thereafter. However, among all the treatments, application of EC + CaCl2 1% was the best edible coating having potential to preserve valuable quality attributes for increasing shelf life of tomato fruits showing minimum physiological loss of weight and reduced the ripening percentage for longer duration followed by application of KMS, Aloe vera extract and okra extract.