A review on the applications of Near-Infrared spectrometer and Chemometrics for the agro-food processing industries

The purpose of this review article is to outline the recent progress in Near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and spectral data analysis using Chemometrics in agro-food processing industries. In recent years, all the processing industries have created the need for cost effective and non-destructive quality control analysis systems to improve their products significantly. Among varies process industries, the agro-food processing industries encompasses all steps from the grower to the customer, involves substantially different types of process, which require monitoring for safety, conformance to specification and profit optimization. The agro-food processing industries cover a wide range of activities utilizing agriculture farm, animal and forestry based products as a raw materials. There are certain traditional quality inspection systems in agro based industries such as agricultural green houses, product stock waste, animal feed, farm machinery, fertilizer, flower bulbs, seeds & seedlings, fresh vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts & kernels, oil seeds and plant & animal oil etc. to assess the quality of their food products by employing machine vision technology to identify the external defects of the products and X-Ray based imaging to identify internal defects of the products, but the NIR spectroscopy technique can also be applied for the above said industries, because it is particularly powerful in non-invasive, non-destructive, speed in analysis, flexibility in adapting to different sample states. However, this NIR spectroscopy requires a unique way to extract relevant physical and chemical information from the sample's spectral data and this can be performed by only a new statistical approach namely Chemometric algorithms. In this review, the principles and advantages of NIR spectroscopy are described first and then its application to various organic products in agro-food processing industries.