Report of the second meeting on Tacler Platform with Quafety Scientists
A brief report of the second meeting occurred on last 18 July follows.
During the meeting, Dr Maria Luisa Amodio of the University of Foggia (Italy) was interviewed on ‘Predicting Shelf Life Using External And Internal Markers: A Case Study On Rocket Leaves’.
From the interview resulted that the aim of the research group of Dr Maria Luisa Amodio within Quafety Project is to provide useful tools to the fresh-cut industry to predict organoleptic and nutritional quality that are based on external indicators, easy to evaluate, without the application of long and expensive protocols, or requiring specialized expertise.
Dr Amodio has explained that the general idea is to describe the degradation kinetics of external, organoleptic, and nutritional quality parameters of fresh-cut rocket in order to link the deterioration rate of external quality to the degradation of the internal quality. Dr Amodio has said: “It is important to predict the organoleptic and nutritional quality of fresh-cut products because companies are used to defining shelf-life only based on appearance and we know that shelf-life based on organoleptic and nutritional quality (which are more important from a consumer point of view) is much shorter than shelf-life based on appearance.”
To study the degradation kinetics of external, organoleptic, and nutritional quality parameters of fresh-cut rocket, Dr Amodio has investigated the possibility to model changes over time of most of the quality attributes of rocket leaves, including sensorial analysis (appearance, firmness, aroma, off-flavour), physical attributes and chemical composition (Vitamin C, phenolics, antioxidant activity, individual sugars and organic acids).
She has found that it is possible correlating the quality degradation rate of appearance with the degradation rate of nutritional attributes by the investigated degradation kinetics. She has explained: “it’s possible to correlate all attributes that shows a significant and unidirectional change over time, by using the time as a common variable. By knowing the kinetics of quality changes at a given temperature profile, it was possible to link the change of appearance score to the change of the ascorbic acid over time.”
You can find the full version of the interview and of the open discussion registering on www.tacler.com and visiting the Quafety section.
We wait on Tacler next 25 July at 2.00 pm (Rome Time = GMT +2) on Tacler platform for the third meeting with Dr Hilary Rogers of Cardiff University (UK). Dr Rogers will speak on ‘SMELLING SHELF LIFE: USING VOLATILES TO ASSESS QUALITY AND SHELF-LIFE’.
See you Friday 25th on Tacler!
Further info:
www.quafety.eu
www.freshplaza.com/sector/109/quafety
www.tacler.com
Contact:
Dr Maria Luisa Amodio
Email: marialuisa.amodio@unifg.it