ICA Consortium award research funding for new dynamic CA

A consortium of ICA, the University of Greenwich (in association with the Produce Quality Centre at East Malling), AC Goatham and Son, Sainsbury’s and Norman Collett Ltd have just been awarded funding from The UK’s Innovation Agency, Innovate UK to fund a three year research project starting in the Autumn of 2015. The project is titled ‘SafePod: New Technology for intelligent control of fresh produce storage’.

ICA’s SafePod is a Dynamic CA system which delivers regular checks on the fruit condition in a small enclosure that contains about 60kg of fruit located within a storage room, through the analysis of enclosed samples exposed to a more extreme regime of Oxygen & CO2 levels thus providing a safety threshold for the whole store.

Initial trials with AC Goatham and Son have established that the SafePod works well in constantly measuring the RQ in 6 CA rooms checking that the lower than normal oxygen in the rooms remains safe and ensuring the fruit leaving store is of good quality, sound, of excellent eating quality too.

This Research funding will see the full scale trialling and further development of the SafePod system for UK fruit and growing conditions and determine how best this new technology can be implemented to the benefit of the UK fruit storage industry.