Detecting errors in ingredient production before they reach the customer

One of the key factors in food quality is homogeneity.Ensuring that a food product maintains the same texture, taste, performance...is essential to guarantee quality and customer brand loyalty.

But in products containing blends of powdered ingredients, this is not always easy. The slightest deviation during the production process can compromise the homogeneity of the final products.

Traditional quality systems focused on specific wet analysis are not always able to detect these minor deviations, resulting in some products reaching the customer with no deviations detected.

This is when the complaints come in, negatively affecting brand reputation and costing companies an extraordinary amount of money.

In this case, a producer of juice ingredient blends was supplying a blend of pectin and dextrose, which is used to keep pulp particles in suspension.

Due to a production error, one of the batches prepared to be delivered to the customer contained a blend of pectin with maltodextrin instead of dextrose.

The company had implemented a quality control system with Chemometric Brain, which analyzes the chemical fingerprint of each product. When the analysis was performed with the NIR software, the spectrum of the batch with the wrong blend gave a totally different result from the previous ones, which was used to detect the error before the product was delivered to the customer.

If only analysis of the properties included in the specification -pH and moisture- had been performed, this product would have arrived to the customer without detecting these deviations. However, the use ofNIR technology and advanced analysis allow all incoming and outgoing batches to be checked quickly, resulting in a full chemical fingerprint assessment, which in this case detected the error in the formulation of this product when compared to previous batches.

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