Correlating Dielectric Properties of Melons with Quality

Visible and physical characteristics of many fresh fruits and vegetables are available for correlation with maturity and/or quality, and some of these, such as color, density, elasticity, and firmness, are used in automatic sorting of some produce into different categories for the market. For the honeydew melon, however, no useful characteristics of this type have been found for reliable correlation with maturity or quality related to eating preference. The best criterion for melon quality is soluble solids, which are mostly sugars, and therefore a measure of sweetness. Therefore honeydew melons were grown and harvested with a range of maturities and soluble solids contents for dielectric spectroscopy measurements of the melon tissue to learn whether differences in the dielectric properties might exist that could be correlated with quality. This required the extraction of tissue samples from the melons and measurement of expressed juice with a refractometer, which has been calibrated to indicate percentage of soluble solids