Informative webinar for food industry operators from all over the world
Geoff Carss, Chemometric Brain Chief Growth Officer, and Beatriz Carrasco, Chemometric Brain CTO, have started a series of informative webinars open to all operators in the global supply chain to explain what Chemometric Brain is and the problems that it can solve for food companies and suppliers.
The first webinar hosted a global audience with attendees from USA, Canada, India, Columbia, France, Spain, UK and Russia, amongst others.
Geoff Carss first explained that Chemometric Brain has been operating for more than 10 years as a proprietary software of Blendhub, but in January 2020 it separated from Blendhub into a completely independent organization due to significant interest from a large number of organisations in the sector to adopt the technology into their own companies.
The solution has been developed and trailed over last years by a team lead by Dr Beatriz Carrasco, Chemometric Brain CTO.
Chemometric Brain is a solution to democratize the use of a very powerful technique as NIRS which as technology has been around for many years but never extensively adapted into the food sector due to the complexity and lack of easy-to-use solutions in the market
Beatriz Carrasco explained that NIR has been used for years in a quantity approach but not in a quality approach. This means that it only used a small range of the spectra, while, in a quality way, more spectra are used to verify that the composition is the right one.
Why is Chemometric Brain such a significant tool for food companies? 40% of food is powder based and powder is not easy to differentiate.
According to Dr Carrasco, “food companies need to ensure the qualification of ingredients; validate homogeneity of the blend; control every single batch of the product; facilitate a quick technological analysis for validation or rejection; avoid human errors in analytics; centralize approvals from any production site and unify a global replicable food quality system”.
And all this can be provided by the Chemometric Brain system. The use of this technology helps to reduce business risk by identifying food fraud; improving food traceability; managing NIR data from sites around the world and multiple manufacturers all in one place and by achieving a rapid implementation using preexisting product libraries.
Dr. Carrasco explained some use cases and showed different product samples to demonstrate how this system contributes to identify food fraud: it allows to verify if a supplier has changed the composition of a blend and even to check the age of a product.
Geoff Carss also highlighted that many SMEs could benefit from this system since it could help overcome many current issues with food authenticity by using a highly innovative cloud-based solution that can be implemented in a matter of days.