A Feasibility Study towards the On-Line Quality Assessment of Pesto Sauce Production by NIR and Chemometrics.

The food industry needs tools to improve the efficiency of their production processes by minimizing waste, detecting timely potential process issues, as well as reducing the efforts and workforce devoted to laboratory analysis while, at the same time, maintaining high-quality standards of products. This can be achieved by developing on-line monitoring systems and models. The present work presents a feasibility study toward establishing the on-line monitoring of a pesto sauce production process by means of NIR spectroscopy and chemometric tools.