Food quality and safety is a scientific discipline describing handling, preparation and storage of food in ways that prevent food borne illness. Food serves as a growth medium for microorganisms that can be pathogenic or cause food spoilage. Therefore, it is imperative to have stringent laws and standards for the preparation, packaging and transportation of food. The conventional methods for detection of food contamination based on culturing, colony counting, chromatography and immunoassay are tedious and time consuming while biosensors have overcome some of these disadvantages. There is growing interest in biosensors due to high specificity, convenience and quick response. Optical biosensors show greater potential for the detection of pathogens, pesticide and drug residues, hygiene monitoring, heavy metals and other toxic substances in the food to check whether it is safe for consumption or not. This review focuses on optical biosensors, the recent developments in the associated instrumentation with emphasis on fiber optic and surface plasmon resonance (SPR) based biosensors for detecting a range of analytes in food samples, the major advantages and challenges associated with optical biosensors. It also briefly covers the different methods employed for the immobilization of bio-molecules used in developing biosensors.

Non-destructive systems are recent trends for quality evaluation of fruits and vegetables. Information on post-harvest variations in electrical properties is needed to develop new instruments for this purpose. Electrical properties are finding increasing application in agriculture and food processing industries. Knowledge of dielectric properties of foods as a function of moisture content and temperature is essential in the design and control of drying systems. As simple, rapid and non-destructive measuring techniques, dielectric spectroscopy provides information about the dielectric response of materials to electromagnetic field. Electrical properties of agricultural materials have been of interest for many years. The interest in dielectric properties of materials has historically been associated with the design of electrical equipment. This review paper covers theoretical aspects of different electrical properties, their measurement techniques, applications of dielectric properties in agriculture/food processing sector and potential applications of thermal imaging (TI) for quality and safety assessment in food processing. The values of dielectric properties of a number of products including food grains, fruits and vegetables, and meat and meat products are presented in table form. This comprehensive coverage will be useful for academic, scientific and industrial community in treating and applying the facts in developing/testing new processes and products based on electromagnetic energy application.Keywords Electrical properties . Non-destructive . Measuring techniques . Dielectric constant . Loss factor . Thermal imaging technique . Food quality evaluationThe material investigation and moisture measurement using electromagnetic waves in wide spectrum serve for quality control and improvement in many branches like industry, forest and wood-working industry, civil engineering, agriculture, commerce and also foods e.g. for quality evaluation of meat, fruits, coffee etc (Hlavacova 2003; Venkatesh and Raghavan 2004). Non-destructive evaluation of quality based on constituents of fruits and vegetables has been successfully used (Chen et al. 1999;Jha et al. 2001;Kawano 1998). Electrical characteristics of agricultural materials have been of interest for many years (Nelson 2006) and are utilized in many areas of human activities. Techniques for non-destructive determination of quality and related characteristics of agricultural products are helpful to producers, handlers and processors . Permittivity and moisture can be closely correlated when water content is high. Knowledge of dielectric properties in partially frozen material is critical in determining the rates and uniformity of heating in microwave thawing. Electrical properties are important in processing foods with pulsed electric fields, ohmic heating, induction heating, radio frequency, and microwave heating. These properties are also useful in the detection of processing conditions or the quality of foods (Barbosa-Canovas et al. 2006). Considering ...

No abstract

Milk and fruit juices have paramount importance in human diet. Increasing demand of these liquid foods has made them vulnerable to economic adulteration during processing and in supply chain. Adulterants are difficult to detect by consumers and thus necessitating the requirement of rapid, accurate and sensitive detection. The potential adulterants in milk and fruit juices and their limits set by different regulatory bodies have been briefly described in this review. Potential advantages and limitations of various techniques such as physicochemical methods, chromatography, immunoassays, molecular, electrical, spectroscopy with chemometrics, electronic nose, and biosensors have been described. Spectroscopy in combination with chemometrics has shown potential for rapid, precise, and sensitive detection of potential adulterants in these liquid foods.

No abstract