For milk powder producers, final product control is essential to meet strict regulatory standards, guarantee comprehensive quality assurance, ensure consistent nutritional quality, and extend shelf life. These are all especially important for infant formula and dairy ingredients used in sensitive applications.

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a fast, reagent-free method for measuring key quality parameters such as moisture, protein, lactose, and fat content directly in milk powder. The NIRS solution requires no sample preparation, enabling real-time monitoring either in the lab or directly on the production line. This allows producers to react quickly to process variations, minimize waste, and maintain product integrity batch after batch.

The obtained NIR spectra (Figure 2) were used to create prediction models for the different reference parameters. An external validation set was used to verify the predictive performance of the calculated prediction models. Correlation diagrams which display the relation between the NIR prediction and the reference values are shown in Figures 3–6 together with the respective figures of merit (FOM).