A melon base juice to be used in the beverage industry is one of the alternatives Embrapa proposes to reduce fruit waste. The concentrated product does not present a melon taste or aroma and can be used by the industry as a base for the production of blended juices, nectars and other beverages. Today this role is played by apple, the main raw material for the juice bases of many different beverages with fruit. The aim is to also replace water and sugar with a healthier foundation ingredient. The corporation seeks partners to validate the technology on an industrial scale. The product can very be useful to reduce melon waste. In 2015, losses reached 37% of the total produced, based on the last production survey made by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). A good portion of the total was not used for purely aesthetic reasons: spots in the rind, lower size that usual, or an irregular shape. Despite consumer rejection, such melons' nutritional properties remain intact. The food engineer Raimundo Marcelino da Silva Neto, from Embrapa Tropical Agroindustry, explains that the industry largely uses base juice from apples, fruits that grow in temperate climates, to produce blends, nectars and other products with different flavors. The development of the melon juice base offers an alternative to explore a raw material from tropical agriculture. The technology was developed in partnership with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) Chemistry College and with the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (Cirad). “A good part of the melons stays in the fields due to flaws in their visual aspect. It does not meet consumer nor export standards. This would be the raw material for the production of this clarified, dearomatized base concentrated at between 68º and 70º Brix (percentage mass of soluble solids present in the juice)”, Marcelino Neto explains. He recalls that some countries in the European Community grant tax incentives for products without added saccharose. Depending on the processing used in the industry, the melon juice base maintains nutrients such as vitamins and sugars (glucose, frutose and some saccharose) and natural acids present in the fruit. The technology uses tangential microfiltration by membranes for the clarification. “We have optimized the technology with added enzymes to increase the yield of the process”, he explains. In order to extract the aroma, resins that capture volatile compounds present in the juice are applied . After that, the product is vacuum concentrated. The juice concentrate is dense, similar to caramel in color, and has to be diluted in the industry. “As it is a concentrate, water will not have to be transported, which reduces logistic costs. This also favors conservation, because it is possible to keep it at room temperatures or at most in refrigerator”, asserts Marcelino Neto. The technology used for the production of melon juice base will also be tested in other tropical fruit such as cashew and bananas. According to Marcelino Neto, it is possible to develop different products by combining the technologies to remove or preserve the flavor, thus producing mixtures with the characteristics desired. Seven thousand hectares to the trash In 2015, Brazil lost 195,000 tons of melons, which corresponds to 37% of the total production. That is the equivalent to the production of an area of 7,000 hectares being lost. One cannot determine, however, the amount that was left in the field, was lost in transportation, spoiled in supermarkets, or ended up in domestic trash. “37% was lost. We are not using “lost” in the literal sense of the word. We do not know where they are. There are no official records that allow us to know. We know that the national melon industry is very small”, states the researcher in the area of post-harvest technology Ebenezer de Oliveira Silva, from Embrapa Tropical Agroindustry. In the case of melons, most losses occur in the trade chain - the so-called cosmetic loss. “Fruits with small deformations and that are thrown away because the consumer does not want to buy that. Because of the high standard of quality demanded by the population, much of what is produced is thrown away”, explains the scientist. Developing countries, such as Brazil and Mexico, have suffered from losses both due to infrastructure and from cosmetic losses. “Our post-harvest structure is not enough to support the large fruit productions that we have. On top of that, there is a large developed middle class, which entails a higher rate of cosmetic loss”, Ebenezer Silva clarifies. One of the strategies of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to reduce hunger and ensure sustainability is minimizing the post-harvest loss of fruit and vegetables. Another one is using what would be lost in the industry, which is the aim of the base juice developed by Embrapa. “One of the ways to reduce post-harvest losses is to create technologies for processing, giving another use to the fruit. The melon industry in Brazil is very small, thus we believe that this technology could benefit both the industry and growers”, he says. For the researcher, the proposal to use melon as base juice is interesting to reduce the so-called cosmetic losses. “They are high quality melons, which can be industrialized when they do not reach the high requirement of market standards. They could be used to produce, for instance, a dearomatized concentrated juice that could be an ingredient for the food industry, especially the juice industry”, he believes. According to him, it is necessary to also observe other industrialization possibilities. In some countries, melon has already been used for the production of moisturizers and sunscreen. “An alternative would be to discover melon's active substances and develop inputs for the Brazilian cosmetic industry”, he proposes. The specialist warns that there are several possibilities of using melons as a product. “But the highest volume would be the concentrated juice,” he affirms. Data Kg % Production 521,596,000.00 Exports 223,746,193.00 42.9 Per capita consumption 102,981,050.00 19.74 Loss 194,868,757.00 37.36 Population 205,962,100.00 Information on melons - Reference Year 2015 Sources: Production data, per capita consumption, and population by IBGE -2015; Exports data from MDIC-Aliceweb http://aliceweb.mdic.gov.br/ Environmental Impacts Quant. Unit Total/lost quant. Carbon footprint 710 Kg CO2 eq/t melon 138,356,817.47 Water consumption 0.197 m³/kg of melon 38,389,145.13 Fertilizer consumption - Nitrogen 6 Kg of Nitrogen/t of melon 1,169,212.54 Sources: Water consumption: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-013-0630-0 Carbon footprint http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652612004805 Full Study: Teccen. 2016 Jan./Jun.; 09 (1): 75-80. Translation: Mariana Medeiros