Monitoring and prediction of sensory shelf-life in strawberry with ultraviolet-visible-near-infrared (UV-VIS-NIR) spectroscopy.

The suitability of UV-VIS-NIR reflectance for predicting the sensory shelf-life (SSL) and the number of days under refrigerated storage (DS) for strawberries was examined. The performance of different classification methods for predicting the days of storage was compared. Partial least squares regression (PLSR) models were calibrated and evaluated for predicting the number of days under storage resulting in similar performance with NIR (R² = 0.870), UV-VIS (R² = 0.874), and UV-VIS-NIR (R² = 0.877) datasets in evaluation sets. The shelf-life of strawberries were estimated from the visual sensory scores from a panel. Based on the sensory shelf life of each strawberry and their days under storage, remaining days till rejection (DTR) was calculated. PLSR models were trained to predict the remaining DTR from UV-VIS-NIR reflectance datasets resulting in performance up to R² = 0.712 in evaluation sets. The influence of the number of days of storage...