ABSTRACT
Quality determination of fruits and vegetables encompasses varietal characteristics that are mostly visual and tactile in nature. These quality attributes provide an insight into maturity indices of fruits to determine proper maturity conditions and approximate nutritional content. These factors are important to determine end product quality whether fresh or processed. Various methods have been developed to assess the quality parameters in fruits that can be broadly divided into destructive and non-destructive methods. Destructive methods include spectroscopic methods, titration, chromatography, and texture analyzer that include compression forces leading to sample destruction. With advent in technology, non-destructive methods are gaining momentum to efficiently and quickly detect the internal composition of fruits. These methods are based on magnetic, acoustic, and moisture properties of fruits, thereby helping to assess the fruit samples in the field itself without any sample destruction. However, implementation of non-destructive techniques is still in its infancy and experiments are being conducted to develop more techniques that are cost effective and widely available. The present chapter deals with the basic differences between both destructive 346and non-destructive techniques and the technology behind quality assessment of fruits using both the methods.
