The Importance of Precooling Strawberries
Fresh fruits and vegetables begin to decay the moment they are harvested. Precooling is a powerful way to slow the decay rate, limit disease, and preserve product quality. Strawberries begin to lose marketability if they aren’t cooled within an hour of harvest.
Additionally, faster cooling means the quality is maintained. This is why fast precooling is so beneficial. Strawberries are cooled by forced-air cooling to achieve the best results.
Precooling Strawberries with a MACS Cooler
The MACS Cooler is an automated forced-air precooling system, so of course it can precool strawberries. In fact, the MACS Cooler excels at precooling strawberries.
A 2-module MACS Cooler will precool 24 pallets of strawberries in about an hour. Several of our customers enjoy fast and easy strawberry precooling along the California coast. From Watsonville and the Salinas Valley down to Santa Maria and Oxnard, MACS Coolers are precooling strawberries like nothing else can.
Most of our strawberry cooling customers own more than one MACS Cooler. At some of these facilities, a MACS Cooler is loaded with a new batch of strawberry pallets every 3 minutes on average. That ensures maintaining the highest quality of fruit and the longest shelf-life.
We have worked closely with strawberry precooling facilities to create product codes tailored to their packaging type. MACS Coolers have been precooling Strawberries since the first version was installed in 2004.
This experience has allowed us to develop unique product codes for different strawberry packaging configurations. And the flexibility of the MACS makes it easy to create new product codes for future package designs.
Along with strawberries, MACS Coolers can precool anything that is normally cooled by forced-air cooling methods. That includes fresh fruits and vegetables, and more.
Request a quote if you’ve got a strawberry precooling need and see how a MACS Cooler can help