Agri-Food Products Quality Assessment Methods

Abstract

Quality of the food stuff is significant at the home level as well as large scale food production and plays a vital role in consumer’s health safety. Various forms of malnutrition, misuse of additives, pathogenic microorganisms and toxins affect directly or indirectly the health of individuals around the globe. The heart of this problem was raised because the farmers concentrated on maximizing the yields with large quantities and earning profit without focusing on consumer health impact. There is a need for analysis of the quality of food products to avoid illness. The analysis involves the determination of contamination, chemical composition, quality control, processing, and ensure the law of food trade compliance. Some of the destructive and non-destructive techniques are enhanced toward the food quality assessment. Imaging and spectroscopic methods deliver the non-invasive quality assessment. It can provide qualitative and quantitative data under single analysis. This chapter ensures a critical review on spectroscopic and imaging techniques combined chemo metric analysis, which achieves better accuracy of 99% for food quality analysis, role of machine learning and deep learning mechanisms are discussed for food quality evaluation followed by blockchain-based grading mechanism to supply chain traceability of food products, quality measures also delineated. The advancement of emerging techniques on IoT integrated with miniaturized products made food quality assessment easier for the end users. Finally, this chapter concludes with the challenges, research gaps, and future scope of food quality assessment techniques.