Factors affecting strawberry quality in fresh and stored fruits

The strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa Duch.) fruits are one of the most widely and popular consumed berries worldwide, due to the organoleptic and appreciable nutritional properties. In the past years, there has been increasing attention and growing number of scientific proofs regarding the consumption of strawberry fruit since it is beneficial to consumers. The composition of strawberry fruits varies and it depends on many pre- and postharvest factors, such as individual genotypes, environmental factors, cultivation techniques, maturity stage and postharvest practices. These considerations are also important to improve strawberry genotypes in term of nutrient and phytochemical compounds and, on the other side, to avoid processing steps and product treatments that lead to a high reduction of the quality. This study performed the evolution of two years breeding program to increasing the nutritional quality along with near agronomic standards required by the market, also study four well-defined strawberry cultivars (Romina, Cristina, Silvia and Sibilla) were selected and tested under treatment with Botrytis cinerea to determine the susceptibility of each cultivar and its relation with fruit quality and applied different cold-storage temperatures (domestic −20 °C and industrial −80 °C) on different treatments (whole fruits and dried fruits) of three strawberry cultivars (Arianna, Francesca, and Silvia), for up to seven months, and evaluated the influence of different storage conditions and lengths on the stability of the fruits’ nutritional compounds. The results show that the high variability in bioactive compounds composition among cultivars and breeding materials, underlying the importance of including wild germplasm for increasing fruit nutritional quality through breeding programs, also highlighted important qualitative changes in the four strawberry cultivars contaminated with Botrytis cinerea, by a decrease in the soluble solids content and increase of acids, in all cultivars phenolic acids and vitamin C there was strong decreased in treated fruit compare to control. In addition, the nutritional quality of the fruits was significantly affected by storage temperature (with −80 °C storage preserving more nutritional compounds), while storage time did not greatly affect the composition of the nutritional compounds in the whole or dried fruits. Oven drying the fruits dramatically affected the nutritional compounds. In fact, results indicated the possibility to generate new cultivars producing fruit with high nutritional contents, stable at the different cultivation cycles, to be labelled with a compositional claim. Strong positive correlation was obtained from nutritional quality with resistance to decay, as high amount of nutritional content more tolerance to botrytis cinerea and it is worth considering in future studies to better plan fruit-storage conditions and time, for maintaining better fruit nutritional quality.