From the Lab to the Table – Food Analysis with Raman Microscopy

This webinar presents Raman imaging applications for the food industry, including analyses of different food and packaging samples. It is part of the SelectScience Food Analysis Summit 2022.

Contents

The food industry continuously aims to optimize food properties such as texture or flavor, which are strongly influenced by the distribution and microstructure of various ingredients and additives. Hygienic and eco-friendly packaging of the final products is another important task for the food industry. Therefore, research and development, as well as quality control, require powerful analytical methods for studying the distribution of compounds in food and packaging samples. Confocal Raman microscopy is well suited for this task, as it is a non-destructive technique for visualizing a sample’s chemical composition on the sub-micrometer scale.

This webinar presents how Raman imaging can characterize food and packaging samples to help understand the products and production processes. After a brief introduction to the principles of Raman imaging, measurements of cheese, butter and frozen bread dough will be shown, among other examples. The detection of titanium dioxide (TiO₂) in candy coating will be illustrated and analyses of packaging foils will be presented, including the visualization of material defects. Techniques such as 3D Raman imaging, topographic Raman imaging, and Raman-based automated particle analysis will be illustrated by various examples.

In this webinar you’ll see:

• The principles of Raman spectroscopy and 2D and 3D Raman imaging
• Correlative techniques such as topographic Raman imaging and Raman-based particle analysis
• Various examples for Raman-based food analysis, including butter, cheese and gingerbread samples
• The detection and characterization of food additives such as TiO₂
• Analyses of food packaging foils, including the visualization of material defects