Mission: “Long-term storage of flavorful Rocha pear”

The mission of the Rocha Pear Postharvest Unit is to produce and transfer useful knowledge to help the supply chain to provide consumers with flavorful Rocha pear and appropriate the value generated.

Long-term goals

• Generate knowledge to allow the companies to manage the quality of Rocha pear thoughout the supply chain;
   
• Develop recomendations to long-term storage of Rocha pear, using the technologies available in the market;
   
• Provide acitve survaillance on postharvest technologies that may affect the sector's competitiveness;
   
• Design new decision-support procedures to assist  the management of storage systems according to comercial objectives.
   

RDI Strategy

Underlying all the experimental strategy are the fundamental concepts of process engineering with its metrics of productivity and quality. The focus is placed in the storage and transport logistic operations. These operations have a fundamental reason: store and move products to increase their value.

The conceptual model adopted has as inputs Rocha pear and postharvest treatments and as an output Rocha pear with increased value in a diferred time or a different place. In the first three years the programme parametrizes the effect of controllable factors and quantify the effect of uncontrollable factor to support the engineering of Rocha pear quality.