Abstract

Food waste during all stages of the supply chain and at the consumer is an emerging problem. Non-destructive methods to determine the freshness of packaged food products could play an important role in the reduction of this problem. In this study, we developed a chemical sensor, i.e. a sensor foil, capable of detecting amines as food spoilage indicators in reaction vessels and model packaging units by fluorescence spectroscopy. To obtain the foil, a phosphorylated porphyrin was adsorbed to silica and then extruded in polyethylene. The reactivity of the foil was tested with single amines in reaction vessels to demonstrate the behavior under ideal conditions. The sensor foil was applied in model packages containing salmon or cheese to show that fluorescence spectroscopy can be used to detect the emission of spoilage indicators. Lastly, model experiments with cod filets were carried out to obtain data to test the capability of determining the freshness by machine learning algorithms.

© 2023 SPIE