Standardization of process for ready-to-use flavoured sapota powder

Sapota fruit is highly perishable with limited shelf-life. Due to cold sensitive nature of the fruit, bulk of the produce needs immediate disposal for table purpose and is handled at ambient conditions causing considerable post harvest losses. In past, scientists have worked on extending shelf life of sapota fruits by various chemical treatments, packaging technology, pre-cooling and cold storage as well as refrigerated transport. They found some good results for domestic as well as for long distance market. However, only few technologies are commercially adopted by farmers or traders. Hence, value addition through processing is important not only for economic utilization of increased production of sapota, but also for checking the commodity losses. Sapota fruit is highly perishable so that, bulk of the produce is used for table purpose and due to mishandling of produce and about 25-40 per cent is being wasted. It is essential to produce value added products based on sapota, so that farmers get an assured price for their produce all the time. By blending cocoa and coffee flavour in sapota, there may be chance to produce unique flavour for making sapota powder more effective.