Intermittent Warming in Alleviating Chilling Injury—a Potential Technique with Commercial Constraint

Chilling injury (CI) limits the advantage of using low temperature to maintain quality of fresh produce. Interrupting low-temperature storage with one or more short warming periods is a potential strategy to prevent this problem. While in theory the intermittent warming (IW) is an ideal technique to reduce CI, optimising and applying an IW regime commercially is challenging, and therefore, research effort in the new millennium on IW has decreased. Generally, a successful IW regime is arrived at empirically, by trial and error, and what works on one cultivar or growing condition may not be as successful on another. The review reports some of the time-temperature combinations employed to reduce CI in horticultural crops and attempts to elucidate possible mechanisms by which IW reduces CI. Understanding the mechanisms involved in CI reduction may allow identification of alternative novel techniques to harness the benefits of IW without the associated industrial issues or could provide information about the physiological and biochemical basis of the CI disorder.