Australian Citrus Quality Standards Program - stage 2 (CT12004)

What was it all about?

Established in 2011, the Australian Citrus Quality Standards program has an overarching goal of ensuring the price of Australian citrus is maximised. To do this, it works to solidify the industry’s reputation as a reliable supplier of high-quality citrus, capitalising on aspects of taste, colour, freshness and food safety.

The key activity in this second stage of the program was to complete a large-scale consumer sensory evaluation exercise linking fruit eating quality to Australian Citrus Quality Standards. Taste panels were conducted in Perth and Melbourne, and included six navel orange taste panels with 720 test subjects tasting 2160 fruit samples, and four Afourer mandarin taste panels with 480 test subjects tasting 1440 fruit samples.

This exercise was the largest ever undertaken in Australia on citrus and gave the industry the confidence to adopt the BrimA method of measuring fruit maturity, and to set consumer acceptance thresholds based on this method.

These new Australian Citrus Standards for oranges and mandarins, using BrimA as the predictor of citrus likeability, have now been widely adopted by the entire supply chain.

Other key achievements included…

• Some 2384 citrus maturity tests being performed
• 102 Australian Citrus Quality Standards market reports sent to industry
• An Imperial mandarin granulation panel was trained.