•A survey was made by collecting samples of all types of apple cartons used in China.•The local and average airflow through stacks of horticultural products are analyzed.•Cooling efficiency of different carton designs analyzed by a novel integral approach.•A based provided for further optimization of carton designs.•A based provided for minimizing energy consumption during FAC. The current packaging designs and the efficiency of forced-air cooling (FAC) of fresh produce can be considerably improved by comprehensively comparing and evaluating the existing packaging designs. This study presents a market survey that studies samples of typical apple cartons used in China. Furthermore, by combining experiment and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling, a novel integral approach is proposed to evaluate cooling rate and uniformity, energy efficiency, and fruit quality (including safety) as a result of FAC for different ventilated-packaging designs. The process uses CFD to simulate the three-dimensional spatio-temporal distributions of airflow and product temperatures during precooling. In addition, experiments on chilling injury and mass loss are also reported. The results show that the optimum fresh-fruit packaging design depends on the product size and the location of the product and tray inside the packaging. For all existing package designs, the optimal air-inflow velocity is found to lie in the range 0.4–1m/s (or 3–5Ls−1kg−1), any further increase in airflow rate simply wastes energy because it leads to a relatively low increase in cooling rate and uniformity. The level of chilling injury and mass loss per box show a different trend with increasing air-inflow velocity. The accuracy of the CFD simulations was confirmed by a good agreement with experiments. The maximum root-mean-square error and mean absolute percentage error for produce temperature are 0.727°C and 18.69%, respectively. This research unveils the advantages and disadvantages of the various existing packaging designs and provides a reliable theoretical and experimental basis for achieving an integral evaluation of the performance of FAC.