NIR - Articles and news items

NIR and class-modelling methods for brand protection in food and beverages

Issue 4 2011 / 6 September 2011 / Professor Gerard Downey, Teagasc Food Research Centre Ashtown

The penetration of on-line NIR equipment in the food processing industries continues to grow as companies realise the full potential of this technique. For the most part, it is deployed to monitor concentrations of key components in a raw material or finished food product and, with the use of feedback control systems, rectify deviations from specification before any problems arise. However, NIR spectroscopy has the potential to play a much greater role in food companies and one key area has to be its use as a fingerprint technique to monitor conformance to specification or to afford a significant level of brand protection through real-time comparison of such spectral fingerprints to established company norms for any given product. This article reviews some recent developments in this area and, in particular, explains some new chemometric approaches which may be exploited for this purpose.

Quality is an important determinant of food choice by consumers but it is a credence attribute i.e. a property that cannot be verified by the consumer at point of purchase. Quality perception is most likely to be derived from other intrinsic or extrinsic clues such as brand name for example. To ensure repeat purchasing based on a quality attribute, therefore, a major challenge facing food companies is the collection of real-time data on products leaving the production line to demonstrate consistency i.e. continued conformance to their own production specifications. (more…)

Screening of acrylamide contents in potato crisps using VIS and NIR technology

Issue 2 2011 / 13 May 2011 / Vegard H. Segtnan and Svein H. Knutsen, Nofima AS, The Norwegian Institute of Food, Fisheries and Aquaculture Research

Acrylamide is considered a potential carcinogen and is present at elevated concentrations in different types of heat-treated foods. It is formed during baking, frying and roasting of raw materials from plant origin, particularly potatoes and cereals. Acrylamide is one of the reaction products in the Maillard reaction between the acrylamide precursors, amino acids and reducing sugars. A high natural level of acrylamide precursors and the specific processing conditions, mainly short frying at high temperatures between 160 and 190°C, put potato crisps in the group of food products with the highest level of acrylamide. (more…)

Mapping food composition using NIR hyperspectral imaging

Issue 3 2008, Past issues / 18 August 2008 / S.J. Millar, M.B. Whitworth, A. Chau, Campden & Chorleywood Food Research Association and J.R. Gilchrist, Gilden Photonics Ltd

Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is widely used in the global agri-food industry for the non-destructive assessment of both the compositional and physical characteristics of a wide range of raw materials and finished products. This is particularly so in the cereals and related industries where, following the commercial development of suitable NIR instrumentation in the 1970s, the technique rapidly became the main means of determining a range of compositional properties which form the basis of trading operations worldwide.

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Testing NIR Spectroscopy for drip loss prediction

Issue 1 2008, Past issues / 28 February 2008 / Marjeta Candek-Potokar, Agricultural Institute of Slovenia and Maja Prevolnik, University of Maribor, Faculty of Agriculture, Maribor, Slovenia

Meat quality has many different meanings. To some, quality refers to aspects of the carcass in respect to weight, fat cover and distribution, muscling/conformation and bruising. To others, quality refers to aspects such as chiller assessment attributes ie. meat colour, intermuscular fat colour and marbling. In pork, the attention of both industry and consumers is largely focused on the water holding capacity of meat.

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Online transflectance NIR imaging of foods

Issue 1 2007, Past issues / 7 March 2007 / Vegard H. Segtnan, Jens Petter Wold and Martin Høy, Matforsk AS, Norway and Jens T. Thielemann and Jon Tschudi, SINTEF ICT, Norway

Most solid foods are heterogeneous on one level or another. Minced meat or an intact piece of meat, for example, will have smaller or larger local regions that are almost pure fat, pure lean meat or pure connective tissue. For such heterogeneous foods the distribution of the local differences is approximately the same throughout the sample.

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Innovative uses of NIR to improve baking

Issue 4 2005, Past issues / 21 November 2005 / Dr. Richard Dempster, American Institute of Baking

Near Infrared Reflection (NIR) is an established and valid measurement method for many specific compounds, (moisture, protein, fat, etc.) within the food industry. Recently, two ideas have emerged from the American Institute of Baking (AIB). The first is to use NIR to monitor processes and the second is to use NIR to predict the performance of flour in the bakery. This article will focus on how AIB is developing an NIR prototype to follow and/or predict dough development.

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Evaluating chocolate blends

Issue 2 2005, Past issues / 3 May 2005 / S.J. Millar and A.G. Hall, Baking and Cereals Processing Department, Campden & Chorleywood Food Research Association

Chocolate is widely appreciated globally as a luxury food. Although its introduction to Europe and the rest of the world occurred some 500 years ago, the cocoa bean had been recognised as a highly significant plant in South America for thousands of years prior to that – having been cultivated by the Aztecs.

So prized was their drink (chocolatl, derived from the bean) that it was referred to as ‘the food of the gods’ in their mythology. In turn, this was clearly an influence many years later when the genus, of which the cacao species is a part, was named Theobroma – a derivation of the Greek words for God (Theos) and food (broma) (Russell Cook, 1963).

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What’s inside cheese?

Issue 1 2005, Past issues / 31 January 2005 / Dr Gerard Downey, TEAGASC, The National Food Centre, Ireland

NIR is widely used in food analysis with application to many sectors. In this article Gerry Downey addresses its value to the dairy industry.

The dairy industry is of enormous financial significance in Ireland and many other European countries and it is currently undergoing a period of large scale rationalisation into many fewer but larger production units. Concomitant decreases in employment numbers exerts pressure on the manufacturing operations to maintain high levels of quality in the wide array of products that the industry produces. Near infrared has obvious potential for addressing this issue, yet its use by the dairy sector is far from extensive. We have recently been involved in a study of the use of NIR for monitoring the quality of two types of cheese of commercial importance: Cheddar cheese and processed cheese. The results of this three-year study are currently being published but some highlights of already released material are described below.

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