Multifactorial analysis of the effects of pre- and postharvest treatments on quality of stored tomato

Abstract

This study attempted to explain the effect of combined pre and postharvest treatments [preharvest treatment (PHT) with a natural catalyst (ComCat®), disinfection and packaging (DP) and storage environment (SE)] on some quality parameters of stored tomato, using multifactorial statistics. The application of Wilk’s lambda (λ) test statistic to the data showed the existence of a highly significant (p < 0.001) three-way interactive effect of treatments on some of the quality outputs. The similarity map of the response variables was defined by two significant principal components (PCs), PC1 and PC2, accounting for 30.9% and 21.89%, respectively, of the total variances. DP had a highly significant effect on PC1 (p ≤ 0.001) and PC2 (p ≤ 0.01) and were responsible for the largest proportion of their variances (30.9% and 5.5%, respectively). Response surface plots showed that PHT with ComCat®, disinfection with chlorinated water and packaging and cold storage were the consistent treatment combination for the optimal maintenance of the quality of stored tomato.