Impact of commercial processing on volatile compounds and sensory profiles of flat peach juices by PLSR and BP network

Abstract

Fresh peach juice and commercial juices were assessed by a trained sensory panel. Differences in the volatiles between fresh and commercial juices were distinguished by partial least squares regression (PLSR) combined with backpropagation artificial neural network. Totally, 10 compounds of three samples were identical: five esters, four alcohols, and one aldehyde. In addition, principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis combined with PLSR revealed that esters were the characteristic volatiles accounting for the differences between fresh and commercial juices. By taking esters as input, the established BP network could correctly distinguish flat peach and commercial juices. Moreover, 10 esters were selected as the key volatiles with the BP network. However, commercial treatment caused a significant reduction in the content of the key esters between fresh flat peaches and commercial juices. Therefore, the changes in esters caused the significant differences in flavor quality between fresh juice and flat peach juices products. Practical applications The decrease in esters is the main factor that caused the difference in flavor quality between the commercial juices and fresh flat peach juice. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize processing parameters to reduce the loss of esters, which further improves the flavor quality of commercial flat peach juice. These results provide a theoretical reference for the design of a modern high-quality peach juice processing technology.