%0 Journal Article
%T A Review of Optical Nondestructive Visual and Near-Infrared Methods for Food Quality and Safety
%A Jarmo T. Alander
%A Vladimir Bochko
%A Birgitta Martinkauppi
%A Sirinnapa Saranwong
%A Timo Mantere
%J International Journal of Spectroscopy
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/341402
%X This paper is a review of optical methods for online nondestructive food quality monitoring. The key spectral areas are the visual and near-infrared wavelengths. We have collected the information of over 260 papers published mainly during the last 20 years. Many of them use an analysis method called chemometrics which is shortly described in the paper. The main goal of this paper is to provide a general view of work done according to different FAO food classes. Hopefully using optical VIS/NIR spectroscopy gives an idea of how to better meet market and consumer needs for high-quality food stuff. 1. Introduction Consumers are the driving force in the food market. They have become more health conscious, demanding and willing to pay for the ¡°good quality.¡± The consumers¡¯ trust for food industry has been diminished due to food scandals thus making it important to improve the safety monitoring. The ¡°quality¡± and ¡°safety¡± have different meanings and aspects which depend on the food class, target market, criteria, and application. In some sense, the safety is part of the quality but here we separate these two because we like to emphasize the difference between how a human perceive the food and how we can evaluate threats of health. Some unsafe food cannot be detected by manual inspection. The food quality and safety evaluation has become more important and the need for more comprehensive assessment for all food batches is adequate. Even though a lot of research and development work has been done on food safety and quality, more needs to be done to find economic ways of monitoring food safety. In this paper, our purpose is to go through the subject according to Food and Agriculture Organizations of the United Nations (FAO) categories (http://www.fao.org/) and publications related to quality and safety. These two factors can be evaluated in many different methods and techniques. The traditional methods are sensory evaluation, chemical analysis, and microbiological analysis. A more recent approach in technical sense is optical techniques, especially the multispectral methods in visual and near-infrared wavelengths. The optical methods can be used for nondestructive, fast, real-time, online monitoring of all samples (Huang et al. [1]). Table 1 gives a general comparison of these four approaches. Table 1: Comparison of method properties. The sensory evaluation is the oldest method and still used every day. The evaluation is done by both consumers and professional food observers. It is relatively fast but hardly suitable for a large amount of samples due to many
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijs/2013/341402/