采用近红外光谱技术进行冰淇淋混合料的质量控制

Ice cream is a complex emulsion of water, dairy products, fat, proteins, sugars, and air. Each component of this frozen dessert plays a crucial role in creating its smooth and creamy texture. During ice cream manufacturing, quality testing ensures batch-to-batch consistency to meet consumer expectations. Quality analysis of ice cream involves analyzing fat content, protein percentage, and total solids as well as lactose, sucrose content, and calories. These factors influence the texture and flavor, shelf life, and consumer satisfaction. Standard laboratory analysis of ice cream is time consuming and requires sample preparation. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a simpler alternative chemical-free technique that measures all these parameters simultaneously in a few seconds.

The obtained NIR spectra (Figure 1) were used to create prediction models for the different reference parameters mentioned in the previous section. A leave one out validation procedure was applied. Correlation diagrams which display the relation between the NIR prediction and the reference values are shown in Figures 2–7 together with the respective figures of merit (FOM).