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Martin - Potato Hot Box
Use the Martin Lishman Potato Hot Box range for quality control monitoring on-farm, during processing and at supermarket intake points. The Hot Box reduces bruise development time from several days to just 12 hours. Faster monitoring for bruising and disease avoids costly rejections and assists in the drive for the highest quality product.
Why use the Hot Box as part of quality control procedures?
Highlight crops most at risk – the Hot Box can help to avoid bruising by highlighting the crops most at risk from harvesting and grading damage. Early detection means reducing storage losses and costly processing rejections. The value of the crop can be maintained, extra transport costs avoided and consumer confidence sustained.
Early warning of disease – potatoes can be monitored before storage to ensure damaged tubers with the potential to spread rot and disease are not included. Optimum settings of temperature, humidity and testing time that will accelerate the incubation of diseases, can be created and their presence assessed.
Supermarket shelf life – supermarkets wishing to achieve longer shelf life for produce can use the Hot Box to re-create the conditions in the fresh produce areas of the shop. Discovering the delay between arrival and deterioration can determine the optimum shelf life or the best conditions to extend shelf life for produce.
Can the HotBox be used for other produce?
The hotbox can not only be used with potatoes, but avocados, apples, tomatoes, peaches and other fruit and vegetables.
- Automatic control of temperature and humidity levels with timer to allow infinite variation of testing regimes at up to 97% RH, 40°C and 999 hours
- Ultrasonic atomizing humidifier keeps humidity levels at an accuracy of 1-3%, helping to create the optimum warm, damp conditions for bruise or disease development
- Wire tray baskets accept 25 tubers in a single layer to suit sampling protocols, spaced to allow air circulation for rapid bruise development
- Faster bruise development– the biochemical reaction which causes a colour change when potatoes are bruised can take several days to appear in cool dry conditions. The Hot Box speeds up the reaction by creating the optimum warm, damp conditions for bruise development to occur more quickly. Optimum bruise development is at 30°C and 97% RH for 12 hours.
- Testing protocol– samples should be peel tested for bruises as soon as they are removed from the Hot Box. Testing should ideally take place on a tray full of tubers taken regularly from the harvester or grader line. If readings are high, samples should be taken at more locations to try to pinpoint the causes. This can be carried out in combination with our TuberLog electronic potato