Pg. 12-13 Determination of fruit quality of litchi cv. Mauritius in different orchards

Litchi (Litchi chinensis Sann.) cv. Mauritius is a popular export cultivar due to its attractive red colour and exotic flavour. Fruit quality parameters, such as juice acidity, soluble solids concentration (SSC), SSC:TA and skin colour are generally considered to determine the fruit quality at harvest. A multivariate analysis, canonical variate analysis (CVA), was used as a statistical tool to discriminate the orchards that produce good quality fruits from inferior quality fruits using twelve physical, five chemical and three sensory parameters. The CVA helped to determine the relative contribution of each parameter to the discrimination between orchards. The correlations and the plot of loadings of the variates indicated that fruit weight, skin colour, hue⁰ and fruit firmness are the main factors that discriminates orchard 3 from the other two orchards. The SSC and TA are the two quality parameters that discriminate between orchards 1 and 2.