Brand Protection, Quality Assurance and PAT. How can Vibrational Spectroscopy Help?
Gerard Downey,
Professor,
Teagasc Food Research Centre
Process analytical tools (PATs) are only beginning to be deployed by the major companies in the food processing industry. These tools have many years of use in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries and their use is actively encouraged by regulatory agencies in the US and Europe. PAT philosophy involves the real-time control of specific unit processes in a food production operation by the collection, interpretation and response to accurate information about the status of such processing operations. In this way, product quality is designed into the process rather than being measured in the finished product. Out-of-specification finished product may only be detected in the traditional quality control approach with all the potential for wasted production, product re-work or, even worse, product recall. In this presentation, some specific properties of individual vibrational spectroscopic techniques (mid-IR, near IR and Raman) will be examined along with an interpretation of their specific advantages and dis-advantages. Following on from this, a description of recent instrumental advances which make them increasingly attractive as PAT tools will be presented. Extraction of meaningful information from spectroscopic data sets is a key step in process monitoring; both popular emerging chemometric methods will be a described and compared in a mathematics-free way.. Finally, results of some recently-published research on a number of specific food quality issues will be described and the utility of their application in a PAT scheme discussed.
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