Abstract
Cocoa is a commodity responsible for the income of millions of people and the manufacture of several important products for the food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic industries. Its quality is associated with several factors involved in the processing steps, mainly in fermentation and drying. The objective of this study was to evaluate the application of near-infrared spectroscopic data associated with multivariate analysis to classify cocoa beans according to their quality and predict attributes such as pH and total acidity by PLS-DA and PLS, respectively. The pH values (4.4-6.7) and total acidity (6.12-29.9) were determined by conventional methods. The PLS-DA proved to be effective in differentiating the classes of cocoa samples with superior and inferior quality, presenting in the validation 100% and 71.43% correct cocoa bean classification with inferior Quality and Higher Quality, respectively. The models obtained by PLS presented satisfactory parameters, being classified as having moderate practical utility and excellent predictive capacity for pH and moderate practical utility and reasonable predictive capacity for total acidity. Thus, the potential of the NIRS technology associated with chemometrics was found and showed efficiency in the classification and prediction of attributes in cocoa beans.
Highlights
The cacao tree is a plant of the family Sterculiaceae, genus Theobroma, of the species Theobroma cacao L. that grows in tropical regions around the world
The Partial Least Squares (PLS)-DA technique is capable of generating functions or models that classify the samples into their relevant classes
Partial Least Squares-Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) was effective in differentiating the classes of higher and lower quality samples, determining to which class an unknown sample belonged based on the information provided to the system
Summary
The cacao tree is a plant of the family Sterculiaceae, genus Theobroma, of the species Theobroma cacao L. that grows in tropical regions around the world. Especially in fermentation and drying, it is possible to obtain a quality product. This quality is due to the occurrence of some changes, such as acidification and temperature increase, which are necessary for the reactions to process satisfactorily and promote the development of characteristics pertinent to cocoa and its derivatives (Krähmer et al, 2015; Oliveira et al, 2016)
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