Customer reference
Quality control of non-carbonated beverages
The customer is a global beverage company producing several types of beverages including soft drinks, sports drinks, dairy drinks, juices, tea, and coffee.
Activity & Context: Production quality control of non-carbonated beverages, fruit juices, and water
Equipment: HERACLES Electronic Nose with AlphaSoft & AroChemBase
Quality control of non-carbonated beverages
Objective methods are required to control the quality of juice
The influence of bacteria, oxidation of nutrients, unclean environment and other factors may cause the juice to become sour thus causing flatulence, off-odor and other changes. The main application of the HERACLES e-nose in the beverage industry is very meaningful, mainly for the monitoring of odor changes. In the past, the odor evaluation of fruit juice was judged by human sensory panel. Most of the unqualified fruit juices could be detected. However, when judging controversial samples, repeated confirmation was often required. The HERACLES e-nose can provide the odor fingerprint of fruit juice, and quality control models such as SIMCA, SQC, Sensory ID, etc., to provide objective data support, and assist the human sensory panel to conduct quality control of juice products.
Since 2018 this beverage producer started to look for a powerful tool to assist the human sensory panel and make the odor assessment of juice more objective. After serious market research and comparison, they decided to choose the Alpha MOS HERACLES ultra-fast gas chromatography e-nose. HERACLES E-nose has good repeatability and stability, and the patented Sensory ID sensory identification model could meet their needs to monitor the quality of juice. As a result, the customer ordered HERACLES e-nose system for one of their manufacturing factories in China.
Benefits of using the HERACLES e-nose
“With the HERACLES e-nose, we successfully built a model to monitor the off-odors in juice. The results show that once the deterioration or batch inconsistency occurs, the smell is different from the quality control model, and the system will automatically give a result of failure or pass. It is user-friendly and can be easily used for products release by operators.
Now, this equipment is not only used to simulate the quality control of samples in the production line by the human sensory panel, but also develop and expand the application in other fields, such as the monitoring of CIP clean water, which effectively avoids the production line to be polluted when switching products”, comments the electronic nose user.