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Electronic Tongue for Food Safety and Quality Assessment

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Techniques to Measure Food Safety and Quality

Abstract

The sense of smell and taste play a fundamental role in human development and biosocial interactions. Taste is an important organoleptic property governing the assessment of food products. It is one of the prime factors determining the quality, market potential, and commercial success of foods. Thus, taste assessment is one of the most important quality control parameters for evaluating foods. The primary subjective method for taste measurement is generally by human panelists. However, the sensory method is very complicated to perform and analyze; it is variable depending on the panelists and conditions of assessment. In addition, it is time-consuming and thus difficult to include in the quality assessment in the food production line. Recruiting taste panelists and maintaining them can be highly difficult, especially when working with food products not preferred by the panelists. Furthermore, unsafe and toxic molecules are not allowed to be tested by the sensory method. Therefore, the analytical taste-sensing multichannel sensory system called as electronic tongue (also known as e-tongue or artificial tongue) could replace the sensory panelists. The concept of the electronic tongue is to measure a “fingerprint” of a sample allowing sensitive comparison in relation to the taste measurements. A sound basis for electronic tongues is provided by the extensive progress of developing well-known selective sensors, especially electrochemical and biological mimicking sensory systems of mammalians. The electronic tongue can be used for a wide range of food items to characterize, authenticate, quality evaluation, process monitoring, and quantitative analysis of foods. Thus, electronic tongue includes benefits like reducing reliance on human panel, and it could be rapid and used in the quality control in the food production line. This article briefly discusses the mechanism and application of electronic tongue with respect to food safety and quality assessment, and the contents would be highly useful to the food professionals working in the academic, research, and industry.

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  1. Department of Chemical Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka, Bangladesh

    Farrhin Nowshad & Mohidus Samad Khan

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  1. Department of Chemical Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    Mohidus Samad Khan

  2. Department of Food Science and Nutrition, College of Agricultural and Marine Sciences Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman

    Mohammad Shafiur Rahman

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Nowshad, F., Khan, M.S. (2021). Electronic Tongue for Food Safety and Quality Assessment. In: Khan, M.S., Shafiur Rahman, M. (eds) Techniques to Measure Food Safety and Quality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68636-9_11

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