3.1. Firmness and weight loss
Firmness is the main feature of fruit quality [18]. The firmness
values of chitosan coated and uncoated red kiwifruit were shown
in Table 1. It was observed that firmness values of uncoated red
kiwifruit started to decline after the first days of storage meanwhile
statistically reliable changes of this parameter were not detected
during the period from 7 to 14 days. Consequently, the firmness
of uncoated berry samples was low and presented 30.9% of initial
value after 26 days of storage. Decline of berry firmness was
characteristic to chitosan coated samples as well. This parameter
for coated berries presented 24.2% of initial value at the end of
storage. Based on these results, we can state that chitosan coating
affected the berry firmness value significantly up to the eighteenth
day of storage and later no significant differences were determined
at p
≤
0.01 significance level (Fig. 1a). As Krupa, Latocha and Liwinska
[18] have reported, fruit firmness rapidly decreased for cultivars