Over the past few decades, consumer expectations regarding food quality and freshness have risen steadily. To achieve quality levels that are acceptable to typical buyers, fresh fruits and vegetables sold at supermarkets and other commercial outlets must go through stringent sorting procedures. The quality assessments of fruits and vegetables use colour and other visible characteristics to determine factors such as ripeness, uniformity of shape and size, and absence of defects on skin and flesh. Other assessments look at texture-related features such as firmness, toughness and tenderness. Quality assessments help to decide the appropriate kind of processing and application for each fruit or vegetable, such as peeling, slicing, canning, syrup preparation or raw fruit consumption. 
As the demand for food items in both domestic and export markets has grown, automation in the assessment of food quality must go through a process and become a key requirement to help food producers achieve high and consistent quality during both short and long consumption periods; reduce costs; and achieve higher overall supply chain efficiencies, to gain the trust of the consumers.