What Is Food Integrity?
Food integrity is an umbrella concept for the fundamental food properties:
Food Authenticity
Food is refered to as authentic when its origin is correctly stated and declared.
Food Safety
Food is considered safe when it’s secure to consume and does not pose any health risks.
Food Quality
Food quality refers to food that meets the preset quality specifications
Related negative concepts for food integrity degradation are:
Food Fraud
Food fraud is the intentional degradation of food integrity.
Food Adulteration
Food adulteration is food fraud by admixture.
Food Mislabelling
Food counterfeit is food fraud by incorrect origin statement, declaration, or production and, or expiration date statement.
Food Spoilage
Food spoilage is the microbial degradation of food safety and, or food quality.
Food Counterfeit
Food counterfeit is food fraud by stating the incorrect product name and or manufacturer.
Food Contamination
Food safety degradation by harmful chemicals, foreign bodies, parasites, or microorganisms.
Why Spectral Imaging?
The VideometerLab instrument provides fast, versatile, and non-destructive detection of many types of food fraud as well as food quality and food safety issues.
Videometer spectral imaging measures more than 12 million spectra on a food sample within a fraction of a second. Every pixel in the image is a spectrum covering UV, visual color, and NIR ranges of areas down to 30×30 µm.
This unique and versatile technology allows fast characterization of food integrity in terms of color, surface chemistry, texture, shape, and size without touching the sample and with little or no sample preparation.
Further, spectral imaging provides more informative and specific information than traditional food imaging.
Food Fraud Examples
Food spoilage is a primary cause of food waste around the world. It typically causes a deviation in appearance from conforming product. Color and/or texture may become different and the microorganism or metabolites from the microorganisms may be directly visible on the surface. Spoilage is often associated with unpleasant odor and taste as well as with an increase in softness. In the video to the right Tom Ashfield of Rothamsted Research is illustrating how VideometerLab may be used to detect spoiling pathogens on strawberries.
1, 2, 3 Go!
Setting up a protocol for food integrity assessment is a three step procedure:
1
Define sample preparation and presentation
Select a feasible way to present your sample in a standardized way.
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2
Define conforming product and non-conforming product by example
Conforming product definition must be representative for acceptable variations of good products, non-conforming product definition may be non-specific – meaning everything but conforming product – or specific – incorporating definitions of each type of non-conformity.
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3
Build analysis recipe
Use the built-in machine learning and AI to automatically detect and quantify non-conforming product in terms of count, area, and/or volume, or in terms of percentages of these relative to the full sample.
Once the recipe has been defined then it can be stored in a local database or in the cloud for easy deployment to new samples with the corresponding product ID. Having the recipe availabe will mean that new samples are measured and analyzed in VideometerLab in app. 10 seconds including sample handling. Automated presentation by a robot and automated feeding of granular products are available as are customized in-line versions, VideometerLine, of the technology.
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