Mixed-Load Compatibility & Will These Ride Together?

No — this is the textbook bad pairing. Apples are very-high ethylene producers and lettuce is highly ethylene-sensitive, so even though both hold at about 0°C and 95–100% humidity the ethylene from the apples turns the lettuce brown (russet spotting) and speeds decay. The tool flags the apple–lettuce cell red ("never") with ethylene as the binding conflict and puts them in separate loads.

It judges every pair on four axes: do the recommended storage temperatures overlap, do the humidity ranges overlap, does one item produce enough ethylene to damage the other's ethylene sensitivity, and does one give off enough odor to taint the other. The worst of the four sets the pair's verdict, and the worst pair in the whole basket sets the load verdict. The binding conflict is whichever axis scored worst.

Onions and garlic store dry — only 65–75% relative humidity — while most fruits and vegetables want 90–95%. Co-loading them either over-dries the moist produce or sweats the onions. They are also very strong odor producers that taint odor-absorbing items like apples, carrots and potatoes. The tool flags the humidity mismatch and pulls the alliums into a separate dry, ventilated load.

Ethylene is the natural ripening hormone. Producers — apples, pears, bananas, avocados, stone fruit, muskmelon — give it off as a gas. Sensitive items — lettuce, broccoli, carrots, cucumbers, kiwifruit, watermelon — respond to even trace ethylene with yellowing, toughening, bitterness or accelerated decay. Putting a strong producer with a sensitive item in a sealed reefer is the most common avoidable spoilage cause this tool catches.

When a basket can't all travel together, the tool partitions it into the fewest groups where no pair is a hard ("never") conflict. Each load card shows its members and the shared temperature window. So a five-item basket that fails as one load might split into, say, a 0°C ethylene-tolerant fruit load, a separate ethylene-sensitive vegetable load, and a dry onion load.

When the items are compatible, hold the reefer at the overlap of all their recommended ranges — the tool reports this shared temperature window. The safe rule is the warmest item's minimum: never take a chilling-sensitive item (banana, cucumber, tomato) below its threshold just to satisfy a cold-stored item, because chilling injury is irreversible. If the windows don't overlap, that is itself a reason to split the load.

In this database the very-high and high producers include apple, pear, apricot, peach, avocado, papaya and muskmelon. Bananas, mangoes, plums and tomatoes are moderate. These should be kept away from the ethylene-sensitive list, or ventilated and shipped over short transit times, to avoid triggering premature ripening and the cascade of softening and decay.

Yes. Strong-smelling commodities — onions, garlic, leeks, ginger — give off volatiles that odor-absorbing items readily pick up. Apples, carrots, potatoes and pears are notorious absorbers and can taste of onion after sharing a store. The tool scores odor as its fourth axis and warns when a strong producer sits with an absorber even if temperature and humidity match.

Most fruits and vegetables want 90–95% relative humidity to limit shrivel and weight loss; leafy greens and root crops often want 95–100%. The dry exceptions are onions, garlic and winter squash/pumpkin at 50–75%. Because the moist and dry classes can't share air, the tool treats a large humidity mismatch as a hard conflict, not just a minor one.

The temperature, humidity, ethylene and odor ratings follow USDA Agriculture Handbook 66 ("The Commercial Storage of Fruits, Vegetables, and Florist and Nursery Stocks") and the UC-Davis Postharvest Technology Center compatibility chart, which group commodities into seven storage classes. The values are recommended midpoints for planning; always confirm against the current chart and your own cultivar and transit conditions.

Yes — build the basket of everything you intend to load, read the matrix to spot the offending pairs, and use the split panel to see how many separate loads or store rooms you actually need and at what temperature each should run. It is built for produce buyers, packhouse managers, exporters and transport planners deciding what can legitimately ride together.

"Risky" means the two share a window but it is narrow — a small temperature or humidity gap, or a moderate ethylene or odor interaction — so they can travel together if you manage it: pick the tighter shared temperature, keep transit short, and ventilate. "Never" means a hard incompatibility (chilling-injury temperature clash, dry-versus-moist humidity, or a strong producer into a highly sensitive item) where co-loading reliably causes loss.