With the rapid changes in life style in metres cities people find very less time for cooking of vegetables for which a lion's share goes for preparatory activities viz. cutting, shredding, washing etc. that substantially increases the kitchen garbage which could be conveniently utilized for animal feed or compost making. Hence, the concept of minimal processing came into existence about a decade back in many of the Western countries. Minimal processing of vegetables involves the technology of preservation of vegetables as fresh cut and prepared produce primarily for user's convenience without much loss in nutritional attributes with microbial food safety. Bell pepper popularly known as Shimla Mirch is one of the most important nutritious vegetable grown in India. A large quantity of bell pepper fruits is wasted at the farm (15%), wholesale (3-5%) and retail level (10%) due to their unmarketability in fresh form. These losses are incurred due to cracking, colour breaking, sunscalding, undersize, oversize and deformed fruits. Producing minimally processed bell pepper involves cleaning, washing, trimming, coring, slicing, shredding etc. Experiments have been conducted at the Division of Post Harvest Technology, Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi to develop appropriate pretreatments, modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) and storage technology for utilization of this high value vegetable which otherwise would go as farm and market waste. Ideal pretreatments, processing conditions and the effect of packaging as per the HACCP guidelines revealed that chlorine (150 ppm) and its combination with citric acid (0.5%) as pretreatment showed no detectable microbial load and retained better nutritional and sensory quality of minimally processed bell pepper during 7 days of storage at 4°C.
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