Cashew apple fruit (Anacardium occidentale L.) is an under-valued and under-utilized by-product of the nut-processing units in India. Despite its huge production and nutritive values, utilization of this fruit is very limited because of certain factors like lack of knowledge on its nutritional importance, astringency, perishability, and poor processing technologies. This study determined different physical, thermal, mechanical, and physicochemical properties of the cashew apple fruit and the importance of processing, machine designing, product-development, and so on were discussed. The result showed that this fruit has a high moisture content of 85.62% (w.b.), which is the main reason for high softness and perishability. The fruit resembled an oblateellipsoid shape (sphericity: 0.85) with an average dimension of length (50.34 mm), width (42.78 mm), and thickness (36.08 mm). The pH, total sugar, phenolic content, protein and ascorbic acid of this yellowish color fruit were 4.367, 10.573%, 365.303 mg/100 g GAE, 1.130% and 218.933 mg/100 g, respectively. The study also found that this fruit has low thermal properties (thermal conductivity: 0.57 W/m C; specific heat capacity:3.816 kJ/kg C and thermal diffusivity: 0.143 × 10 −7 m 2 /s). The results of this study will help in the commercial production of cashew apple products through product development and designing processing machines.
Practical ApplicationThe cashew apple fruit can be taken as a functional food because of its richness in vitamins, dietary fibers, minerals, polyphenols, and other phytochemicals. The scarcity of scientific research on the characterization of engineering and physicochemical properties of this fruit is the main reason for its less popularity. The measured physical, mechanical, thermal, and physicochemical properties of this fruit will be useful to researchers, machine designers for industrial processing, food scientists and technologists in planning, designing and fabrication of postharvest handling equipment, grader, sorter, storage structures, packaging as well as product and by-product development.
