**4. Conclusions**

High incidence of postharvest fruit losses and waste is a major problem facing the pomegranate industry worldwide [55,56]. The use of plastic liners as internal packages in the multi-scale packaging of pomegranate fruit plays a major role in minimising quantitative and qualitative losses during prolonged cold storage. Packaging pomegranate (cv. Wonderful) in non-perforated liners greatly minimises mass loss and maintains fruit colour and textural quality during cold storage for 84 d at 5 ◦C. Micro-perforated Xtend® and 4 mm macro-perforated HDPE liners were able to minimise moisture condensation within the bags and reduced decay incidence, which are some of the challenges of packing fruit in non-perforated liners. Packing fruit with perforated liners also greatly minimised fruit mass and size loss and retained acceptable quality during prolonged storage compared to packing fruit with no-liner. Using micro-perforated Xtend® and macro-perforated 4 mm HDPE can be considered to minimise postharvest losses often associated with inadequate environment control inside packaging compared to the use of non-perforated liners (note that 4 mm HDPE liners are over three times cheaper than micro-perforated Xtend® liners).

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualisation, U.L.O.; methodology, R.L.; validation, A.A.; formal analysis, A.A., R.L.; investigation, A.A., R.L.; writing—original draft preparation, R.L.; writing—review and editing, A.A., U.L.O.; visualisation, A.A., R.L.; supervision, U.L.O., A.A.; project administration, U.L.O.; funding acquisition, U.L.O. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This work is based on the research supported wholly/in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (grant numbers: 64813). The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the author(s) alone, and the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard. Research reported in this publication was supported in part by the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research under award number 434—grant ID: DFs-18-0000000008.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Data sharing is contained within the article.

**Acknowledgments:** We acknowledge the award of postgraduate scholarship to R. Lufu by the Intra-ACP Sharing Capacity to Build Capacity for Quality Graduate Training in Agriculture in African Universities (SHARE), and the Regional Universities' Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) for support.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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