Food quality evaluation of accelerated shelf life of chili sauce using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and chemometrics

Recently, spectroscopy analysis has been used as a rapid chemical analysis method of food products. To evaluate the potentiality of Infrared spectroscopy (IR) in food analysis during storage, an accelerated shelf-life study was carried out on three types of chili habanero sauces at 50°C for a period of 24 days. Only some physicochemical and sensory evaluation showed changes during chili sauces storage. FT-IR spectra tandem with principal component analysis (PCA) allow differentiating between a fresh sauce and a long-time prepared one. Partial least squares model showed that FT-IR data can be compared to some physicochemical and sensorial parameters. Results of sensorial and spectrophotometry analyses can be used to calculate the shelf life of the sauces. This is the first study that reported about the use of a rapid and low-cost method of FT-IR tandem chemometrics as the food quality evaluation of accelerated shelf life of a chili sauces-based vegetable ingredients. Practical applications Food processing requires faster, more efficient, and easier to use tools to evaluate the quality of its ingredients, the monitoring of the process, and the quality of the final product, as well as methods to monitor the freshness of the products during storage. This study suggests that the infrared spectroscopy together with the chemometric analysis could be a viable and fast alternative, which is given in a single step to cover the needs of quality monitoring of products both in the development of new products and in the process in the food industry.