| Summary: | There is a requirement for rapid early detection of mould activity in food throughout the food chain as part of a quality assurance programme and to enable critical control points to be effectively monitored. The rapid development of electronic nose technology has resulted in examination of the potential of using this qualitative approach to enable decisions to be made about the status of grain and in bakery products. Since moulds produce characteristic odours when growing on different substrates the opportunity exists to use these volatile production patterns to improve decision support systems for making decisions about food quality. We have examined the use of electronic nose systems for the discrimination between different spoilage fungi in vitro and in situ in grain and bread. A real-time monitoring system was developed which enabled a sample to be evaluated in < 10 minutes to provide diagnostic information on whether it was 'good', 'bad' or 'intermediate'. Subsequent studies in bakery products have shown that it is possible to detect and differentiate spoilage mould growth on bread within 24-36 hours of inoculation, prior to visible growth. It was also possible to discriminate between non-microbial tainting, e.g., lipoxygenase, from microbial spoilage by filamentous fungi, yeasts and bacteria. Other traditional methods such as enzymes and colony forming units could only detect changes much later. Potential exists for using electronic nose systems in quality assurance and for monitoring critical control points as part of a hazard analysis critical control points scheme. The recent development of electronic tongue technology with applications for liquid foods and slurries will also be summarised. © Wageningen Academic Publishers. The Netherlands, 2007.
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