Abstract
Electrical characterization of products is gaining increasing interest in the food industry for quality monitoring and control. In particular, this is the case in the ice-cream industry, where machines dedicated to store ice-cream mixes are programmed “ad hoc” for different groups of products. To this purpose, the present work shows that essential product classification (discrimination between milk based and fruit based ice-cream mixes) can be done by means of a technique based on the measurements of non-linear response in the electrical behavior of the electrode–electrolyte interface. The addition of pH measurements allows to further reach the three parts classification occasionally required for advanced applications. The proposed idea is validated by means of measurements on 21 ice-cream mixes, different for producers and composition.
Highlights
While in the early stage of the food industry the competition was mainly focused on costs, today product quality and safety are a primary concern
As far as dairy products are considered, techniques have been proposed for the characterization of milk content [5][6][7], detection of mastitis in raw milk samples [8][9], measurement of microbial concentration in milk [10] and ice-cream [11][12][13]
The results clearly indicate that increasing the test signal frequency results in an increase of the cut-off amplitude VMT and a decrease of the slope in the non-linear region
Summary
While in the early stage of the food industry the competition was mainly focused on costs, today product quality and safety are a primary concern. Today, automated production methods with integrated monitoring systems allow much faster response and the possibility to screen all the products with non destructive measurements. In this context, food characterization by means of electrical measurements implementable in automatic form plays a crucial role and a number of significant examples can be mentioned: detection of water and lipid content in meat [1], dilution factor in apple puree [2], determination of pH, acidity and hardness in yogurt [3], quality control of vegetable oils [4]. As far as dairy products are considered, techniques have been proposed for the characterization of milk content [5][6][7], detection of mastitis in raw milk samples [8][9], measurement of microbial concentration in milk [10] and ice-cream [11][12][13]
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