Influence of Fruit Bagging on Postharvest Quality of 'Harumanis' Mango (Mangifera indica L.)

One of the famous varieties of mango in Malaysia is 'Harumanis' mango. It is pleasant in smell and sweet in taste with orange pulp. The skin remains green although it has ripened. These green-riped mango gains low priority on the market due to consumers preference of fruit with a yellow skin color as an indicator of ripeness. Therefore, the objective of this study was to determine the influence of bagging on postharvest quality of 'Harumanis' mango. Five types of bagging bags with 3 replications were used to bag young mango fruit at the age of 8 weeks after flower anthesis. The 5 different bags were constructed using old newspaper, brown and black paper. Fruits were manually harvested at 8 weeks after bagging when the fruits have matured. The ripening operation was initiated by using 10 ml/L of ethylene for 24h at 26 degrees C. Postharvest quality such as skin and pulp color, skin chlorophylls and carotenoid content, pulp firmness, soluble solids concentration (SSC), pH, titratable acidity (TA), vitamin C, weight loss, skin glossiness and disease severity were determined at day 0, 1, 3 and 5. The experiment was conducted using a completely randomized design and obtained data were analyzed using analysis of variance and mean separation following the Least Significant Difference method. Bagging 'Harumanis' mango fruit during preharvest with different color of paper did not affect mango pulp color, carotenoid content, weight loss, pulp firmness, SSC, pH, TA, vitamin C, skin glossiness and disease severity. However, bagging using brown and/or black paper had shown significant effect on skin color and chlorophylls content of 'Harumanis' mango fruit.