Pink Lady internal browning

November 2010 | Stephen Tancred, Orchard Services | Future Orchards® slideshow; source file updated in 2022

Internal browning is an important storage-risk issue for Pink Lady®/Cripps Pink fruit because symptoms can develop inside apparently sound apples. Stephen Tancred’s presentation focuses attention on the relationship between fruit maturity, orchard conditions, storage management and the likelihood of internal flesh disorders emerging after harvest.

The resource encourages growers and packers to treat maturity as a risk-management tool. Fruit entering long-term storage needs to be assessed with more than colour alone, using measures such as firmness, starch pattern, soluble solids and block history to judge physiological age and likely storage behaviour.

Risk is not uniform across an orchard or season. Crop load, fruit size, weather, mineral balance and maturity can all contribute to variation, so representative sampling and segregation of higher-risk fruit are important where internal browning has been seen previously.

The practical message is to align harvest timing and storage duration with the actual condition of the fruit. Where risk indicators are elevated, earlier marketing, shorter storage or separate handling may be preferable to treating the crop as a uniform lot.