Impact of processing on carrot baby food nutritional quality and safety Potential of fluorescence as in real time monitoring tool

Summary

Background: In the frame of the QACCP (Quality Assessment of Critical Control Points)project of the Core Organic platform, the potential of front face fluorescence for assessment of carrot quality and critical points in processing was demonstrated. The impact of processing on quality loss of organic baby food puree manufacturing was analyzed, including the different steps of the process. The impact of the raw material preprocessing was also studied. Attention was especially paid on potential neoformed contaminants produced during heat treatments.
Material and Methods: Two assays were analyzed among others: one at industrial level to study the different steps of the process; the other at pilot plant to compare different raw material preprocessing. Neoformed compounds, such as fructosyllysine measured as furosine, carboxymelthyllysine and furan were assessed by GC-MS techniques. Fluorescence fingerprints were recorded on a Jobin Yvon fluorimeter and analyzed by a multiway model after convenient pre-treatment. Shortly, 3D excitation emission matrices were preprocessed to eliminate undesirable signals, and decomposed in individual fluorescence profiles using PARAFAC modeling. Multivariate analysis, such as PCA, was applied to the PARAFAC loadings to discriminate the impact of production factors. Multilinear regression was built to predict the concentration of neoformed contaminants from fluorescence.
Results: The samples taken at the different steps of the process indicated significant changes at various steps of the process, especially those associated to a heat treatment. Fluorescence changes, as well as formation of neoformed contaminants were observed after pasteurization or cooking operations and in-bottle sterilization of carrot purees, with the latter inducing the maximal impact. The volatile carcinogenic contaminant, furan, was particularly concentrated in the final bottle as it is trapped after production during sterilization. When comparing different preprocessing of the raw material, freezing before autoclaving was considerably less damaging than processing of the fresh or fresh plus pasteurized carrots. This should result from leakage of the substrates of neoformed compounds during the bleaching process before freezing. High correlation levels were found between neoformed contaminants and fluorescence scores and good calibration models were obtained.
Conclusion: We demonstrate that precise and reliable monitoring the impact of processing using fluorescence is possible. Using prediction models over product quality indicators makes it possible to predict the impact of process on specific process contaminants by simply and rapidly getting a fluorescence image from the product. In conclusion, non destructive fluorescence spectrometry appears a very potent analytical tool to assess at low cost the nutritional quality and safety of raw as well as processed vegetables, such as carrot puree baby food.