Food

Peanuts are a hugely valuable food crop, with worldwide production of more than 50 million tonnes. This blog post looks at how NIR spectroscopy can help peanut breeders and manufacturers of peanut products. We focus on what NIR can tell us about the composition of peanut kernels and peanut butter; and as an example we use NIR to measure sucrose when added to peanut butter.

Innovations in chip-scale sensors and NIR LEDs are creating exciting opportunities for consumers to accurately measure fruit quality with tiny, inexpensive spectral devices. We have demonstrated that we can build robust predictive models for a wide range of apple varieties.

Just for fun, we tested 70 different bars of chocolate using our hand-held NIR spectrometer and a tiny NIR spectral sensor from ams-Osram. Here's what we found.