Processed foods, fruits and vegetables are increasing in popularity in the daily diets of people of both developed and developing countries. Product quality and quality evaluation methods are thus naturally important. The decisions concerning likenessof food, harvesting time, maturity and ripeness of fruits and vegetables are based mostly on subjective and visual inspection. Several non-destructive techniques based on detection of various physical properties that correlate well with certain factorsof a product for quality evaluation have been developed. The quality of fruits and vegetables is mostly judged on the basis of size, shape, colour, gloss, flavour, firmness, texture, taste and freedom from external as well as internal defects. Numerous techniques for evaluating the above external quality factors are now available commercially. Internal quality factors such as maturity, sugar content, acidity, oil content and internal defects, however, are difficult to evaluate. Methods are needed to better predict the internal quality of food products including fruits and vegetables without destroying them. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in non-destructive methods of quality evaluation, and a considerable amount of effort has been madein that direction (Lee, 1981, Jha and Matsuoka, 2000). But the real problem is how these methods are to be exploited practically and what are the difficulties in implement-mg them. The objective of the present Paper is thus to review in brief the application of the most recent non-destructive methods such as nuclear magnetic resonance, x-ray computed to-mography, near-infrared spectroscopy and some other important methods and to evaluate their pros and cons for suitability in commercial application.
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