Detection of Adulteration in Food Using Spectrometric Sensor

Abstract

Food is essential for a human being to survive. Therefore, for safe consumption, the quality of the food is important. Due to the ever-increasing demand for food products, adulteration is a very common process for gaining extra profit. Liquid foods, such as milk, honey, wines, fruit juices, and other cheap liquids are easily mixed with adulterants. Artificial liquid foods prepared accordingly hinder the natural quality of food, but seem to be real products. Therefore, by following a wide range of laboratory methods, experts can identify adulterants and even estimate the amount of adulterant and compound composition. But all these detection methods are not easy to use, time-consuming and expensive. In the modern era, research papers in this particular field have shown that different types of spectroscopy and different techniques operated at a vast range of wavelengths have been used to identify contaminants in liquid products. But, recent studies have also focused on the development of low-cost portable devices to detect food mixing in field conditions and to obtain qualitative results in product composition. Accordingly, in this work, an AS7265x sensor with a spectrometric concept was used to detect impurities in liquid products. This multi-spectral sensor can detect spectra ranging from Visible to NIR and can detect any change in the spectrometric profile against the original profile recorded in the system for qualitative analysis of the liquid food samples such as juice, honey, and dairy products. So, the consumer can identify the quality of the food product in advance.