Research aims to curb food waste
Shanthanu Krishnakumar understands how disappointing it is to sink your teeth into a mealy peach.
The University of Guelph master’s student knows that people want every bite of a Niagara peach to send juice running down to their elbows. So he’s been working in local peach and nectarine orchards for the past year and a half to keep grainy, gritty, dry stone fruit to a minimum.
In the process, Krishnakumar is helping a team of 35 scientists around the world to solve one of the most serious economic and environmental problems on the planet: food waste.
The secret? Harnessing the power of a plant-derived compound called hexanal.
Hexanal already exists in plants to protect them from insects, but when applied topically to fruit, including Niagara peaches and nectarines, it can delay spoilage for weeks.
“Hexanal is present in all plants but in small amounts,” Krishnakumar said. “I found it delays (browning and mealiness) by one and a half to two weeks.”
Krishnakumar has been working with local tree fruit breeder Jayasankar Subramanian on his findings. Their work is part of a four-year global study of hexanal use and its benefits before and after harvest. The Canadian International Food Security Research Fund contributed $4.2 million to the project.
Hexanal’s anti-aging effects on fruit have long been known academically, Subramanian said.
He and another scientist, Gopinadhan Paliyath, experimented with it on Niagara sweet cherries in 2007.
That research would have remained local and relied on academic publications to spread the word if it weren’t for funding from the Food Security Research Fund to experiment with hexanal elsewhere in the world, Subramanian noted. The study is a chance to prove the safe plant product works on a commercial scale.
“Originally this was done to help our growers but when we realized there were other opportunities, we thought ‘Why not?’” he said.
Kris han kumar and Sub ram an ian, who teaches plant science at Guelph and does his research at the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre campus, have carried out a share of the work in Canada while researchers in India and Sri Lanka have proven hexanal lengthens the shelf life and quality of mangos.
The researchers are working with academic and industry leaders to develop commercial products that are easy and affordable for growers and processors to use, including hexanal sprays, dips and wax coatings.
They’re also trying to find ways to incorporate hexanal into packaging materials made from agriculture waste.
At the same time, government agencies, farmers, grower federations and packaging companies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean are ramping up efforts to commercialize the technology and use it on even more fruit.
In Niagara, spraying peaches and nectarines with hexanal gives growers more marketing muscle while consumers enjoy tastier fruit, Krishnakumar said.
“It helps the grower because they have more time to market their produce,” he said. “That means more bargaining power to help the grower. It also helps the consumer because they get better fruit and will buy more fruit.”
That, in turn, leads to healthier populations, Subramanian added.
Last week, Krishnakumar became the first competitor to win both first place and the People’s Choice Award in the national Three-Minute Thesis competition for explaining his findings and their importance in under three minutes.
On a bigger scale, using hexanal in orchards or packing plants would cut food waste dramatically, particularly in developing nations where farmers don’t have access to the same technology, such as cold storage, that growers have here.
About one-third of the food produced each year in the world for human consumption is wasted. That works out to roughly 1.3 billion tonnes, according the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UNFAO). Put into perspective, wealthy nations like Canada, the U.S. and those in Europe waste almost as much food as sub-Saharan Africa produces.
Fruits and vegetables, which would gain shelf life from the commercial use of hexanal, are the most wasted of any food. Nearly US$1 billion of mangos are wasted every year in India because farmers aren’t able to store them or get them to market in time, Subramanian noted.
That figure is particularly poignant for Krishnakumar, who hails from Tamil Nadu in southern India where mangos and bananas are major crops.
“It is very close to home. There are mango growing and banana growing regions nearby. They are in my state and most of this research was in my state,” he said.
Using hexanal to prevent losses would put some of that money back into growers’ pockets. Researchers predict the incomes of nearly onethird of people in the developing world would increase if fruit could stay fresher longer and be sold rather than wasted.
“Those nice tasting fruits can reach everyone else and can help the small rural farmer who barely gets anything for their product,” Subramanian said.
Tiffany Mayer is the author of Niagara Food: A Flavourful History of the Peninsula’s Bounty (The History Press). She also blogs about food and farming at eatingniagara.com. You can reach her at eatingniagara@gmail.com or on Twitter @eatingniagara.