Developing nondestructive methods to evaluate food quality of agricultural materials play an important role in food safety and quality control. Being able to quickly, yet effectively assess the ripeness or condition of foods such as fruits and vegetables can help to prevent hazardous or over ripened food products from entering consumers’ shopping carts. One of these methods includes optical spectroscopy, which uses light to identify properties of a material. In the experiment, a diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) system was used to measure the absorbance and reflectance of banana and kiwi fruit samples. Scans were taken before and after the samples were placed in either a room temperature or refrigerated space for 24 hours to evaluate their ripeness. DRS scans indicated common variations between initial and final scans for both kiwis and bananas. For all samples of whole fruit, those stored in the refrigerator were found to reflect less light after a 24 hour period. Trends among the cut fruit were much less obvious and seem to vary more based on fruit type. Given observed trends, DRS shows promise for use when determining food safety and storage. In order for this to be an effective method for the future, it is important to build a vast database of many types of produce in order to be able to easily evaluate samples.
Authors: Grayce Dyer, Audrey Mannella
Advisor: Karthik Vishwanath, Physics
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