Vibrational Spectroscopy Techniques in the Quality Assessment of Fruits and Vegetables

Abstract

Fruits and vegetables play an important role in the human diet worldwide. Safety and quality are important considerations for the purchase and consumption of fresh raw products. Since the consumers increasingly insist on a very high fruit and vegetable quality nowadays, it is also necessary to provide information about the origin and traceability of these products. One of the alternatives to traditional wet chemistry and human evaluation strategies, which allow quality assessment and control of fruits and vegetables, is vibrational spectroscopy. During the last decade, several vibrational spectroscopic methods have been developed, and have become more widely adopted by the agricultural and food sectors. These methods offer the possibility to rapidly measure several properties of the sample with minimal sample preparation and often to perform nondestructive quality evaluation. In this chapter, an overview of near‐infrared, mid‐infrared, and Raman spectrometries and infrared thermography is given for use in measuring quality attributes of horticultural produce.