The Technologies Making Their Way into Food And Beverage Quality Assessment

Food & beverages assessments have become crucial, especially in the issues of adulteration, replacement, and contamination that happened in artificial adjustments relating to the quality, weight, and volume. Thus, this review will examine and describe features recently applied in image, odor, taste and electromagnetic, relevant to the food and beverages assessment.

FREMONT, CA: Food adulteration, which directly influences human health, is one of the most severe consumer issues in developing countries. It occurs due to lower production costs and more market demand than supply, particularly in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the food has been substituted or blended with other approved or banned ingredients, consumers can't detect contaminated food using their senses and rely on laboratory equipment. To protect food safety and public health, the development of food and beverage assessments is critical and should be a top priority. Several methodological processes and technologies have been developed for food and beverage evaluation, including imaging, aroma, taste, electromagnetic sensing, and others.

1.Imaging technology: Imaging technology is used to create or display two-dimensional or three-dimensional images using imaging processing techniques. The advent of this technology has made it possible to investigate food products' external and internal structure using cameras and image clarity, which improves the accuracy and sensitivity of food quality analysis, particularly in agricultural-related rural products.

2.Hyperspectral imaging (HSI): HSI is a technology that integrates spectroscopic and imaging techniques into a single system that offers both spectral and spatial data. The HSI application has proven its effectiveness in assessing food and beverage quality. The HSI applications now on the market are bulky, expensive, difficult to manage, and primarily employed in laboratories.

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3.X-ray imaging: One of the X-ray imaging technologies used to analyze the quality of foods and beverages is Energy-dispersive X-ray Fluorescence spectroscopy (EDXRF). It combines Ultrasonic velocity and X-ray absorption to detect the concentration of chemical components such as K, Ca, Fe, Zn, Br, Rb, Cl, Cu, Mg, P, S, Se, Sr in milk powder and fat content in green pork hams. To ensure acceptable manufacturing procedures and steady infant formula quality, multivariate statistical approaches are employed to closely monitor milk powder production.

4.Odor imaging: A cutting-edge technology for non-visible matter (odor) detection is currently available in the form of an odor imaging-based colorimetric sensor array. Several tests have been conducted to demonstrate the link between chemical vapor concentration and food and beverage quality. First, a colorimetric sensor array technique is employed to assess the freshness of chicken using orthogonal linear discriminant analysis and the AdaBoosteOLDA adaptive boosting algorithm. Morsy et al. evaluated fish decay using non-destructive methods and sensors, evaluating sixteen chemo-sensitive compounds.

5.Digital and analog image processing: A Computer Vision System (CVS) is a setup that includes a lighting setup, a camera, and image analysis software that runs on a computer. CVS may extract various attributes, including color, image texture, shape, and scale. These simple appearance features allow task-relevant analysis and interpretation due to their precision, objectivity, and speed. Several physicals, chemical, and sensory food quality indicators can be linked to these visual traits. These quality attributes are frequently linked to features that non-destructive frameworks can directly examine. Numerous image processing algorithms have been developed because quality characteristics are related to physicochemical qualities, contributing significantly to the industrial need for automated inspection and grading.

6.Odor and tasting sensing technology: One of the analytical tools used in the food industry for the early identification of quality changes in food products is the sense of smell and taste. The expense of recruiting real pros, on the other hand, is excessive, and our sense of smell and taste is subjective and easily fatigued. The repeatability of the outcomes and low reproducibility are two limitations of tangible evaluation, making it hard to do quantitative research and, as a result, having an instrument that can replicate the human senses of smell and taste and be employed in typical industrial applications.

7.Metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS): This MOS has been employed to build smell measurement arrays more than any other type of gas sensor. Because of its excellent sensitivity to chemicals in a broad spectrum of VOCs, dependability, and reproducibility, the MOS sensor has a lot of applications in food and beverage testing. However, its capacity to work at high temperatures necessitates more power and makes it more susceptible to dampness, making it more prone to drift.

8.Quartz crystal microbalance (QCM): QCM is an extremely sensitive mass sensing technology capable of detecting mass changes in the nanogram range. The high accuracy, detection of a wide range of active elements, and inexpensive cost of production made the QCM sensor popular in food and beverage testing. The QCM sensor, on the other hand, is made up of sophisticated electronics with high sensitivity, a low signal-to-noise ratio, and temperature and humidity sensitivity.

9.Electrochemical sensor: Electrochemical sensors have demonstrated their potential benefits in food and beverage analysis, such as excellent accuracy and sensitivity to chemical contents and low power consumption. The ability of an electrochemical sensor, on the other hand, deteriorates over time due to the deterioration of the electrode catalyst, and process gases eventually pollute in-process applications. Furthermore, the electrochemical sensor has a limited temperature range and has a low degree of selectivity.

10.Assessment method using electromagnetic sensing technology: To enable online quality monitoring, this method uses a planar electromagnetic sensor with radio recurrence excitation and a PC for calculation. The experiment also included a fat content study utilizing Soxhlet extraction of the homogenized sample (including the skin) with petroleum ether, and the results revealed that the impedance values of different regions of swine meat are reasonably diverse.

It should be emphasized that the technology employed in food and beverage evaluation still needs further research to analyze and study the more specific features that might be used to improve evaluation quality. Food adulteration must be avoided due to insufficient food supply for the growing population.

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