Banana Ripening

Pressurised Ripening Rooms

The single most important advancement in fruit ripening of recent times has been the development of pressurised ripening rooms. The key feature of a pressurised room is that the conditioned air is forced to pass through the product, as opposed to a normal storage or ripening room where the product just sits in a conditioned environment.
The optimum design of a pressurised ripening room involves the air passing through each pallet of product separately, and then returning to the cooling coil. Cheaper designs of rooms allow the air to pass through a series of pallets before returning to the cooling coil.
A pressurised ripening room makes maximum utilisation of space, particularly with the two and three tier room design.

Multiple Capacity

The beauty of the Cross Refrigeration ripening system is that the control of the quality of ripening is not affected by the size of the ripening room. Rooms can be single, two or three tier, and any length. In practice, the room size is generally 24-pallet, which corresponds to one container load. Cross Refrigeration have installed rooms from 6 pallets to 52 pallets. Larger rooms deliver exactly the same high quality ripened fruit as smaller rooms. Furthermore, even larger rooms can be operated partially loaded again with no loss of quality.
A typical ripening facility now has a mix of large capacity rooms for bulk orders, and smaller capacity rooms for smaller orders.

Suitable for ripening all types of fruit

Because of the design of the room, it is equally suitable for ripening all kinds of fruit, including tomatoes, bananas, avocados, and mangos. The use of chilled water as the refrigerant allows precise control of air temperature, usually to within one tenth of a degree of the set point.

Naturally high humidity

One of the main reasons for loss of quality or shortened shelf life is poor humidity. Most fruits and vegetables need air of high humidity in order to have maximum quality and shelf life, and of course as fruit is generally sold by weight, any drying out of fruit directly reduces profit margins!
The Cross Refrigeration system is specifically designed to maximise the natural humidity in a room and to minimise dehydration without the need for artificial injection of moisture.
In fact, due to the careful design of the cooling coil and refrigeration system, and the hermetically sealed room construction, humidities of well over 90% are normal for most of the ripening cycle.

State of the Art Control

The ripening system is controlled by an electronic controller at each ripening room. Each room can be programmed or checked at this controller. There is also the facility for a central computer station which will the monitor the information from all ripening rooms, and allow central programming or even remote access via a modem link.