Effect of Non-thermal Plasma on Physicochemical Properties of Nam Dok Mai Mango

Abstract

Mango is considered as a popular and economically important tropical fruit around the world because of its attractive color, favorable flavor, and high nutritional quality. Nowadays, more consumers consciously desire not only fresh and nutritious but also safe fruits with low or free of microorganisms and chemical contamination. Non-thermal plasma (NTP) is one of the emerging technologies that could potentially decontaminate the fresh food and food processing surfaces. Recently, NTP emerges as a new sanitizing method in the agro-industrial application, where the qualitative characteristics of the treated product could probably be modified by the reactive species as well as the residues of oxidation processes. This study evaluates the changes of physicochemical indexes of Nam Dok Mai mango treated with several NTP conditions. The NTP process was discharged in 0.05 % sodium bicarbonate solution under different voltage levels (800-1500 V) and various treatment durations (2-10 min). It was found that there were significant decreases (p<0.05) in titratable acidity and total phenolic content of NTP treated mango, while the total soluble solid showed a significant increase (p<0.05). The color and texture parameters of this fruit with NTP treatments were not significantly different (p>0.05). The results demonstrated that NTP had slight effect on the physicochemical properties of mango. Future work is required to investigate more comprehensive effect of NTP on the pesticides residues in the mango.