Measurements of High Oleic Purity in Peanut Lots Using Rapid,Single Kernel Near-Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy

High oleic peanuts have improved shelf life vs. conventional peanuts. Purity (percentage of high oleic peanuts within a lot) is critical to ingredient performance and final lot value. Contamination can result from unintentional mix-ups at the breeder/seed level, improper production handling, or due to physiologically immature high oleic kernels. Therefore, industry groups have established unofficial sampling plans to monitor purity. Assuming equivalent measurement performance and simple random sampling, increasing the sample size decreases variance among replicated sample test results and increases the precision of estimated lot purity. A novel instrument (QSorter Explorer by QualySense AG) using near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy was evaluated for high speed (20 kernels per second) high oleic purity measurements. The study objectives were to assess instrument performance in: (1) measuring oleic acid (%) in runner peanuts and (2) estimating the true high oleic purity of artificially mixed peanut lots. Three grades (Jumbo, Medium, and No 1) of US Runner mini-lots each at seven different contamination levels (0, 5, 10, 20, 30, 50, and 100%) were prepared. Oleic acid (%) of individual kernels was measured by scanning replicated samples of 10, 50, 100, and 500 kernels using the QSorter Explorer. The variance associated with each sample size and lot contamination level on returned purity values is discussed in the context of binomial sampling. Overall, the demonstrated measurement performance and capacity of the QSorter Explorer to process much larger sample sizes suggest this instrument can better identify true high oleic peanut lot purity vs. other currently available technologies.