DEVELOPMENT OF A COLOURIMETRIC METHOD FOR QUALITY CONTROL OF SAUSAGE PRODUCTS PRODUCED USING CHITINOUS FOOD ADDITIVES

Abstract

A crucial technological task that must be solved in the production of sausage products is to stabilize the product’s red colour. In this paper, we propose a scheme to determine the most significant parameters of the quality of dry-cured sausages by their colour characteristics. For this purpose, colour digital images were obtained, which were further processed using two classical colour representation systems: RGB and xyY. We monitored changes in pH and the ratio of water to dry matter in meat products. These crucial sausage properties were changed by introducing chitin-containing supplements into their recipes, which allowed us to solve two tasks simultaneously. The first comprises, as already mentioned, changing the properties of sausages to obtain correlations with colour characteristics. The second is to enrich meat products with chitin complex for preventive purposes to improve people’s nutrition. The construction of correlation dependencies using each coordinate separately in two colour systems showed that each system (RGB and xyY) has one colour channel with a maximum correlation coefficient. This is due to the colour features of sausages, which can be represented to the greatest extent with the help of only one colour coordinate in the considered colour representation systems (RGB and xyY). Using these colour coordinates will allow one to achieve maximum measurement accuracy. Thus, two tasks are being solved: the enrichment of food with dietary supplement and the development of a method to control their content.