Peach fruit quality on the fresh market: A long-term evaluation series from Northern Italy is pushing the overturn of commercial standards within the mass-supply chain

Commercial peach fruit quality standards mainly rely on visual and fruit size attributes, often unpredictable or unrelated to organoleptic pleasantness. Hence, surveys on consumers’ continuously reports a poor fresh internal quality of peaches as the main cause of a widespread disaffection. In addition, the consistent adoption of similar selection criteria among main breeding programs hampers a marked improvement of enhanced flavour. This eight-years study reported the quality analysis of 52 peach cultivars sold across several mass-supply chain channels (the so-called ‘Organized Large-Scale Retail Distribution’, GDO), describing the current landscape of marketed peaches in Italy. In addition to the evaluation of external and internal quality parameters, a group of experienced panelists performed a sensory evaluation at commercial ripening (‘ready-to-buy’ stage) and after shelf-life (‘ready-to-eat’) to complement analytic determination and further investigate its relationship with human perception. Overall, soluble solid content (SSC) resulted inconsistent and generally low over the years of assessment, particularly in early and mid-season cultivars. This evidence negatively impacted panelists’ pleasantness that, in turn, appeared strongly dependent on taste sensorial experience and, above all, on aroma and sweetness perception. In particular, aroma tended to be poorly perceived with SSCs below 12 %, while a significant superior preference occurred with SSC above 14 % and a BrimA index above 27. The almost negligible effect of shelf-life on SSC emphasized the largest effect of the pre-harvest conditions for this feature. Accordingly, this study endorses an impelling improvement of the agronomic practices currently adopted and, hopefully, a reorganization of the whole peach retailers’ distribution chain to really meet consumers’ preferences