New food products development

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Aroma and flavor evaluation with electronic nose and tongue instruments

Today, food industries face new market challenges: varied and rapidly changing consumers preferences, increasing demand for healthy and safety-oriented products, ever greater consumption of cooked and processed food. In the development of consumer food products targeting desirable flavor attributes, electronic nose and tongue instruments are viewed as helpful analytical tools and a powerful complement to human sensory evaluation in quality control or product development applications.

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New food products development with an electronic tongue and an electronic nose
This application note describes the sensory evaluation of various formulations of snacks, with an aim to select the optimized product that will meet the market expectations. Eight formulations of snacks were analysed both by a sensory panel and by E-Nose and E-Tongue. The sample set includes snacks obtained based on different manufacturing processes that lead to different textures. The samples were pulverized using blade mixer before analysis, to get homogenised samples. The panel of trained assessors used a Quantitative Descriptive Analysis based on 26 descriptors among which 7 for texture, 5 for aroma, and 14 for flavor. The combination of E-Nose and E-Tongue measurements showed the same grouping of samples as the sensory panel.

Sensory QC of tomato sauce with an electronic nose and an electronic tongue

Quality control of food products must ensure conformity of product, in terms of safety, chemical composition and also from a sensory point of view (smell, taste). To guarantee an appropriate and constant flavor, manufacturers must test the organoleptic features of final products. Currently, food products are assessed by human sensory panels. However, this method is time-consuming and can be unpleasant. This application note presents how to develop an instrumental quality control with the Alpha MOS FOX Electronic Nose and ASTREE Electronic Tongue.

Electronic Nose and Tongue provide the ability to rapidly determine the quality of food ingredients and food products. These analyzers are convenient decision tools to help companies optimize the time and costs of the analysis chain process.

Quality control of processed food with an electronic nose
Assessing the quality of processed food such as spiced sauces, is not easy using sensory panels since it is difficult to have a reference quality product when testing new production batches. In this application the Alpha MOS ULYS-S Gas Chromatography based Electronic Nose is used to evaluate the quality of various batches of sauces.

Spiciness quantification of food products with an electronic tongue

The method currently used is based on HPLC. However, this method has some inconvenients such as long sample preparation time, long analysis time and the need of a standard solution for each analysis.

The ASTREE was then used to quantify the Heat Index of various Tabasco sauces. The correlation between ASTREE measurements and Scoville Heat Index was very good ( > 0.99). The ASTREE results were also very reproducible.

The results obtained demonstrated that the ASTREE Electronic Tongue can accurately predict the Heat Index of finished products such as Tabasco sauces. The ASTREE Electronic Tongue provides an easy, fast and objective alternative to subjective sensory panel or time consuming HPLC for pungency level assessment and spiciness quantification of food.

Monitoring the quality and shelf life of cookies with an electronic nose
The success of this work demonstrates the suitability of the electronic nose for monitoring the quality aspect for cookies product based on their odor characteristics. It shows that the instrument has the capability of not only differentiate products but also to monitor the shelf life. Although this work has been done on a final product, cookie, there is real potential to use the electronic nose for raw materials or ingredients such as edible oils, flour, sugar, chocolate, additives, pecan peanuts, almonds, hazelnut, etc. As illustrated it is also possible to imagine a system used to monitor automatically the baking level of cookies.

Application to spiced sauce of qualitative and quantitative product deformulation with an electronic nose
In the context of the constant evolution of taste, marketing & R&D departments sometimes need to enter a re-engineering process in order to make their current products consistently match the market expectancies. This application note describes the comparative analysis of two similar spiced sauces with the Alpha MOS Ultra Fast GC based HERACLES Electronic Nose where “Brand A” sauce represents the sauce produced by the market leader. Their aromatic profiles were first compared. Then various herbs and spices were investigated in order to screen the possible ingredients entering the formulas prior to re-formulation.

The Electronic Nose and Tongue: a powerful marketing and sales tools in the Japanese food and beverage industry

In Japan electronic nose and tongue instruments have been widely used as Research and Development tools particularly in the food, beverage and cosmetics industries for shelf life analysis or formulation developments. They are more and more used nowadays at the production floor as easy, reliable and fast organoleptic Quality Control instruments. They do give simple electronic signature correlated with the smell and taste qualities (quantitative or qualitative). They can also provide a chemical firewall instrument or early warning process indicators of any changes in the raw materials profiles or finished products qualities.

Electronic Nose and Tongue instruments are now included in sales and marketing tools. They are used by vendors in order to:

Guarantee objectively the batch to batch consistency of products to their customers by providing an electronic signature on every lot delivered
Outrun competitors by showing objective specifications of their products
Position their products versus competition

Electronic Nose and Tongue instruments can be not only part of a manufacturer's specifications under an electronic signature format within relationships with customers or suppliers, but they can also be used as powerful tools to objectivate the organoleptic the specifications of a manufacturer’s products.

This article presents examples where the Electronic Nose and Tongue are part of the marketing and sales efforts of food companies in Japan.

Alpha MOS instruments for sensory analysis
Alpha MOS offers instruments and solutions for chemical profiling. Alpha MOS sensing technologies digitize the human senses and can provide an odor, taste or chemical profile of a product.

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Articles

The Electronic Nose and Tongue: a powerful marketing and sales tools in the Japanese food and beverage industry

Guarantee objectively the batch to batch consistency of products to their customers by providing an electronic signature on every lot delivered
Outrun competitors by showing objective specifications of their products
Position their products versus competition

Application notes

Download Application note, Qualitative and quantitative product deformulation with an electronic nose.pdf (548.52 KB)

Qualitative and quantitative product deformulation with an electronic nose

Date of creation:

30 December 2015

Library code:

10545

Download Application note, Sensory quality control of tomato sauce with an electronic nose and an electronic tongue.pdf (2.64 MB)

Sensory QC of tomato sauce with an electronic nose and an electronic tongue

Date of creation:

30 December 2015

Library code:

10549

Download Application note, Quality control of processed food with an electronic nose.pdf (932.07 KB)

Quality control of processed food with an electronic nose

Date of creation:

30 December 2015

Library code:

10550

Download Application note, Spiciness quantification with an electronic tongue.pdf (500.75 KB)

Spiciness quantification of food products with an electronic tongue

Date of creation:

30 December 2015

Library code:

10551

Download Application note, Monitoring the quality and shelf life of cookies with an electronic nose.pdf (636.27 KB)

Monitoring the quality and shelf life of cookies with an electronic nose

Date of creation:

30 December 2015

Library code:

10537

Literature

Alpha MOS ASTREE Electronic Tongue
ASTREE is the key tool for objective and safe taste assessment: taste masking, shelf life studies, taste comparison, etc.

Download Brochure, HERACLES Electronic Nose technical specifications.pdf (343.88 KB)

Alpha MOS HERACLES flash gas chromatography electronic nose

Date of creation:

17 October 2015

Library code:

10288

Download Brochure, Alpha MOS AroChemBase.pdf (547.79 KB)

Alpha MOS AroChemBase

Date of creation:

17 October 2015

Library code:

10289

Download Brochure, Alpha MOS instruments dedicated to odour,taste and visual aspect (colour and shape) analysis.pdf (1.05 MB)

Alpha MOS instruments for sensory analysis

Date of creation:

15 October 2015

Library code:

10280

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New food products development

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