The cooling of fruits and vegetables in hydrocooling system can be a suitable technique. This work aimed to define cooling time for fruits and vegetables of different sizes, presenting practical indexes that could be used to estimate cooling time for produce with similar characteristics. Fruits (orange melon-Cucumis melo, mango-Mangifera indica, guava-Psidium guajava, orange-Citrus sinensis Osbeck, plum-Prunus domestica, lime-Citrus limon, and acerola-Prunus cerasus) and vegetables (cucumber-Cucumis sativus, carrot-Daucus carota, and green bean-Phaseolus vulgaris), were cooled in a hydrocooling system at 1°C. The volume of fruits and vegetables ranged between 8.18 cm³ and 1,150.35 cm³, and between 13.06 cm³ and 438.4 cm³, respectively. Cooling time varied proportionally to produce volume (from 8.5 to 124 min for fruits, and from 1.5 to 55 min, for vegetables). The relationship between volume and time needed to cool fruits (from 1.03 min cm-3 to 0.107 min cm-3) and vegetables (from 0.06 min cm-3 to 0.12 min cm-3) is an index that could be used to estimate cooling time for fruits and vegetables with similar dimensions as those presented in this work.
cooling time; product volume; sphericity
