Despite of food production is increasing globally, a significant amount of the food for human consumption is lost or wasted, especially perishable foods such as fruits and vegetables (Prusky 2011). The amount of food lost each year is equivalent to more than half of the world’s annual cereals production (2.3 billion tonnes in 2009/2010) (Gustavsson et al. 2011).
It is hard to give precise information on the amount of fruit losses generated globally, because fruit losses vary greatly among varieties, countries, and climatic regions, and there is no universally applied method for measuring losses. As a consequence, the food loss data during post-harvest are mostly estimated and the variations are from 10% to 40% (Prusky 2011). Table 2 lists some examples of post-harvest losses of selected fruits in India, Egypt and United States.