Fresh Mangoes

A mango lot is fruit of a declared cultivar, sized and packed by count, and moving with a declared maturity and a treatment history. Cultivar matters more than in most fruit trades because mango cultivars differ enormously in shape, fibre content, skin colour, flesh character, and how they behave when ripened — and because skin colour development is cultivar-specific, a red blush means ripeness in some cultivars and nothing at all in others.

Because export mangoes are picked firm, an export lot arrives as a fruit that is not yet edible. Where in the chain it is ripened — at the importer, at a ripening facility, at the retailer, or at home — is a commercial decision, and both ready-to-eat and firm-for-ripening presentations exist side by side in the same markets.

Mangoes are picked by hand, and the act of picking creates the commodity's signature problem. Cutting or snapping the stalk releases latex sap under pressure; where that sap lands on the skin of a fruit it causes sap burn, a blackened, corrosive-looking lesion that appears within hours and downgrades or condemns the fruit. The trade manages this by harvesting with a length of stalk retained, then de-stemming the fruit in a controlled way — inverted, over a bench, or in a wash — so the sap flows away from the fruit rather than across it.

Harvest maturity itself is assessed on sampled fruit, using cultivar-specific indicators such as the filling of the shoulders relative to the stem, internal flesh colour, and dry matter. Immature fruit picked by mistake will soften without ever developing flavour or aroma — the recurring commercial failure of the mango trade, and the reason maturity assessment gets the attention it does.

Mango is a host for tephritid fruit flies, so a great deal of the export trade passes through a mandatory phytosanitary treatment before it can enter a market: hot water immersion, vapour heat, or irradiation, applied under an approved protocol and certified. This is a regulatory step, not a quality step, and it is one of the few cases where a fresh commodity is deliberately heated. It also stresses the fruit — treatment can advance ripening and, if misapplied, damage the flesh — so the treatment and the cold chain have to be designed together.

After treatment the fruit is cooled and shipped, but only into the narrow band its physiology allows. Mangoes are chilling-sensitive: held too cold they develop grey, pitted skin, uneven ripening, and off flavours, and the injury shows up on arrival rather than in the container. Ripening at the destination is managed with warmth and ethylene in the same way as for bananas, though mangoes are the more delicate customer.

Grading covers fruit size and count, shape typical of the cultivar, skin finish, firmness, and freedom from defects and disease. Internal quality — flesh colour, fibre, and the absence of internal breakdown — cannot be assessed non-destructively on every fruit, so it is inferred from sampling and from maturity control at harvest, and this is precisely where the trade's disputes arise.

• Sap burn — black skin lesions from latex contact at harvest
• Anthracnose and stem-end rot — the dominant post-harvest diseases, often latent until ripening
• Chilling injury — pitting, grey skin, and failure to ripen evenly
• Immature fruit that softens without developing flavour
• Internal breakdown and jelly seed in over-mature or heat-stressed fruit
• Heat-treatment damage from misapplied quarantine protocols

Most mangoes are eaten fresh, and most are eaten in the countries that grow them — the export trade is a small share of a very large crop. Fruit outside export specification, and cultivars grown for processing, go to pulp and purée, dried slices, juice, and pickled products, with the large processing industries sitting in the main producing countries rather than in the importing ones.

• Food — fresh fruit, the dominant use both domestically and in export markets
• Food processing — pulp, purée, dried mango, and juice, largely at origin
• Beverage — nectars and juice blends made from pulp