On-line monitoring of fat,dry matter and acrylamide contents in potato chips using near infrared interactance and visual reflectance imaging

The contents of dry matter, oil and acrylamide are some of the most relevant parameters in the quality control of potato chips. Near infrared spectroscopy (NIR) is a common technique for routine analysis of bulk chemistry in different raw materials and products because it allows a fast and non-destructive analysis of samples. The objective of this research was to investigate the possibilities of using on-line NIR monitoring of acrylamide, moisture and oil content in potato chips. Sixty samples of potato chips from individual frying runs were measured on-line using a VIS/NIR interactance line scanner. The same samples were analysed in the laboratory to determine their corresponding moisture, acrylamide and oil contents. The mean VIS and NIR spectra for the 60 samples were modelled against the reference values for acrylamide, fat and dry matter using partial least squares regression (PLSR), and the regression models were validated using full cross-validation. On-line NIR interactance was found to predict fat and dry matter of potato chips with high accuracy, i.e. prediction errors of 0.99 and 0.86% (w/w), respectively. The corresponding correlations between predicted values and reference values were 0.99 and 0.97 for fat and dry matter. For acrylamide an average prediction error of 266 μg/kg was achieved using NIR and VIS signals in combination. The correlation between predicted values and reference values was 0.83 for this model. The system may be used to separate samples with very high acrylamide contents from samples with average to low contents.