Non-destructive inspection of unsaturated fat-enriched food matrices by laser scattering imaging

The work focused on applying the laser scattering imaging technique as an inspection system of food matrices enriched in unsaturated fats. For that purpose, the capacity to predict the type of enriching oils and their deterioration status in a non-destructive way was tested. The tested food products were baby food, cream and vegetable puree, while the oils were cod liver, sesame, soybean and wheatgerm. The deteriorated oils versions were obtained by heat-treating them at 180 degrees C for 15 and 30min. In the first part, the capacity to singly characterise the raw materials from imaging information was evidenced. After that, the characterisation of unsaturated fat-enriched foods was carried out. Thus, the type of oils could be predicted from imaging data combined with multivariate supervised classification procedures, independently of which food matrix was included, with precision and recall results around 0.90. The last phase was to test the capacity to detect enrichments with the damaged oils. The results evidenced that the changes generated by the presence of heat-damaged oils could be captured by the technique independently of the analysed food matrix. Results evidenced the potential skills of the imaging technique as a non-destructive quality inspection method for unsaturated fat-enriched food matrices.