Packhouse Guidelines

• Receiving:

Upon arrival the bins / boxes must be weighed and placed in a cool shaded area.
Fruit must be inspected for maturity, disease symptoms and pest damage marks.

• Packing:

To ensure that no skin damage occurs, mangoes should not fall more than 200mm during packing and all equipment must be cleaned on a daily basis.

• Pack-line Sequence:
  • Fruit must be washed to remove excessive soil.
  • Pre-sorting then takes place to remove fruit with visible blemishes.
  • Hot water bath treatment should be used to control diseases such as anthracnose and soft brown rot.
  • The temperature of the water must be 50 C, and the duration of the warm bath treatment is 5 minutes.
  • Fungicide treatment, waking and grading should take place after the warm bath treatment.
  • Sizing of mangoes before packing should take place to ensure that each packed carton consist of similar sized fruit.
  • Packing, labelling and palletizing – local market mangoes are packed in 2 or 4 kg boxes while export fruit are packed only in 4kg boxes.
  • Mangoes should be stored in cool storage at two temperature settings namely 11 C for mature green fruit and 8 C for riper fruit.
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