Protecting potato quality from field to storage

Potatoes often get damaged during harvest, which affects its quality and also results in undesired discoloration during food processing. In this project, by mimicking the impact that is typically observed on potatoes during harvesting using industrial machinery, we studied how the different properties of the potatoes affect its robustness to withstand mechanical impact. This project was performed in collaboration with the company AVR Machinery. The knowledge gained from this study is intended to aid the company further improve the usage of its machinery in situations where the properties of the potatoes are known in advance before harvest. In this project, I setup the data collection protocol using Design of Experiments and performed data analysis to model the relationship between the properties of the potatoes and resulting discoloration at various levels of mechanical impact.