Monitoring Shelf Life of Carrots with a Peptides Based Electronic Nose

摘要

Monitoring and control of vegetable ripeness is a necessary and challenging issue in the food industry; in fact, the state of ripeness during harvest, storage, and market distribution defines the quality of the final product which is approved by customer preferences. Conventional methods used to determine the shelf life of vegetable are based on chemical, microbiological, physical and sensory indices. The majority of the classical methods are time-consuming and require skilled personnel. The aim of this work was to demonstrate that a methodology based on ZnO-peptide based QCMs array of gas sensors are useful to predict the shelf life of carrots. Samples of blanched carrots were stored at different temperatures (4, 25 °C and - 18 °C) and analyzed after one month in gas-chromatography and with the sensor array. The results, analysed using principal component analysis (PCA) indicated that the sensors are able to clearly discriminate the different temperatures of storage.