Analysis of the Relationship between Names and Quality of Various Groups of Food Products

Abstract

Introduction: The analysis of food names is an important task aimed at solving two problems, namely, determining the relationship between research results and individual words used and, as a result, obtaining a reliable, from the point of view of food quality, classification within subgroups. Objective: To analyze the relationship between the names of food products and their micro- and macronutrient composition. Materials and methods: The research object was the whole aggregate of the results of testing bakery products, processed meat products, and milk carried out within the framework of the Federal Project on Public Health Promotion in 2020–2021 by laboratories of the Russian Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare (Rospotrebnadzor). We applied such linguistic analysis methods as tokenization, noise word removal, stemming, and N-gram analysis. Results: For bakery products, we selected words and their parts enabling us to divide samples into previously obtained groups with different contents of sodium, protein, and fat. For processed meat products, classified by the sodium and fat contents, we also compiled a list of words allowing a reverse classification by name. For fluid milk, we obtained a negative result since the products with the established low calcium content did not differ from other groups in terms of names and their parts. Conclusions: The analysis of food names has demonstrated the potential for classifying foods by their names in order to assess their likely micro- and macronutrient composition. It is necessary to conduct a number of further studies aimed at expanding the list of analyzed product groups, especially those included in the consumer basket.