In this blog, we discuss a topic that appeals to almost everyone. That is, the delicious and hard-to-resist snack foods and other delectable goodies. But there’s more that meets the eye to create that irresistible desire for consumers to buy your food brand and keep coming back for more. For you processors of biscuits, crackers, cookies and snack foods, here’s an application blog that I believe you’ll find very informative and valuable for your production operation.
Taste, Texture and Appearance
Taste, texture and appearance are all key quality attributes that determine the success of a food product in the market. Testing the product during the manufacturing process for moisture and color is important to ensure final product consistency and “freshness” and typically requires the use of multiple analytical technologies, which are often located in a laboratory remote from the production line.
Rapid Quality Assurance
At NDC, we integrated our proven Degree of Bake or Brownness (DOB) measurement into our InfraLab At-Line Analyzer to provide simultaneous measurements of moisture, oil and DOB in five seconds. With no special skill required to operate, the InfraLab provides process vision far beyond that of conventional testing.
This provides unprecedented feedback to the process controller, for improved control of moisture, oil and DOB, which offers financial benefits such as:
- Reduced start-up times and scrap
- Production of more consistent, “within specification” product (minimized “checking”)
- Improved operating efficiency
- Acrylamide mitigation
Measurement Performance
The DOB measurement is designed to closely imitate the response of the human eye to changes in brownness and the readings are used as highly repeatable and dependable real-time feedback to the process controller. If necessary, it can also be calibrated to provide a reasonable correlation to the L or L * colorimetric measurement, though there may be occasions where this may not be desirable. In particular, the DOB measures perceived “brownness” as opposed to brightness (L or L *), which means the gauge will distinguish between samples that are different in brownness to the naked eye.
The figure below shows crisps/chips that have been sorted into batches according to British Potato Council guidelines for color (1 to 5, with 5 being the darkest). The corresponding DOB readings are displayed.
The figure below shows savory snack biscuits that have been baked in an oven for varying times with their corresponding DOB readings displayed.
Final Takeaway
After reading this application blog, I hope you can see that our Degree of Bake Measurement is capable of generating meaningful measurements of surface brownness on a variety of baked and fried products. It can readily detect over-baked or under-baked product, which when combined with the moisture and also an oil measurement provides real-time feedback to the process operator for process optimization.
Learn more about our measurement solutions for degree of bake and brownness.
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