Texture measurements conducted did not allow the deduc-tion of a consistent modelable conclusion. Parameters suchas firmness, chewiness, and gumminess of all osmoticallypre-treated samples were higher than the untreated one,when being measured thawed. Cohesiveness and elastic-ity did not differ significantly between treatments (datanot shown). Firmness values (the maximum force occurringduring compression) of all osmotically pre-treated sampleswere significantly higher than the respective values for theuntreated one when measured after thawing, at all temper-atures studied (F > Fcrit) (strawberries stored at 0 days). Thisindicated a protective effect of the osmotic dehydration oncell integrity during frozen storage. A decrease of the maxi-mum force values after freezing shows damaged fruit tissues,partly due to histological damage due to formation of icecrystals during freezing. This increase in maximum forcemay be attributed to the effect of sugar uptake. This agreeswith the report stating that the presence of sugars increasedthawed apple samples firmness (Tregunno and Goff, 1996).Monsalve-Gonzalez et al. (1993) reported that firmness corre-lated significantly with sugar uptake; Torreggiani and Bertolo(2000) stated that cells protected by sugars exhibited less dam-age to the middle lamella and less severe shrinking of thecell content. Calcium chloride also contributed to an increasedfirmness due to the interaction of calcium with cellular wallcomponents of the plant cellular matrix (Gras et al., 2003;Castello et al., 2010). After storage of the samples at all tem-peratures, the firmness values were reduced. The change wasmore pronounced for the osmodehydrofrozen samples (withall carbohydrates used) however the values were still higherthan the corresponding values of the untreated ones. In Fig. 4a,the firmness values for strawberry samples, untreated andpre-treated with the osmotic solutes, stored at −16◦C (180days) are representatively demonstrated. Strawberry samplespre-treated with HDM were more stable during storage at−16◦C; the decrease was more pronounced for pre-treatedsamples with glucose (starting from time zero). The differ-ences between pre-treated samples were not significant asstorage time increased (>180 days).