Application Note: Moisture, Oil and Degree of Brownness in Savoury Snacks

Taste, texture and appearance are all key quality attributes that determine the success of a snack food in the market. Testing of the product during the manufacturing process for moisture, oil, seasoning and color is important to ensure final product consistency and “freshness”. In addition, minimizing acrylamide formation in potato chips is a major concern and it is now generally understood that accurate cooking control with a good moisture measurement is an essential strategy for mitigating that risk.

Taste, texture and appearance are all key quality attributes that determine the success of a snack food in the market. Testing of the product during the manufacturing process for moisture, oil, seasoning and color is important to ensure final product consistency and “freshness”. In addition, minimizing acrylamide formation in potato chips is a major concern and it is now generally understood that accurate cooking control with a good moisture measurement is an essential strategy for mitigating that risk.

Conventional analytical technologies for measuring moisture, oil and brownness in QC labs provide accurate measurements at “snap shot” intervals in time and usually takes many minutes or hours to perform on a small sample (typically a few grams). Often, this leads to:

• Very poor verification of on-going process control
• Potentially inefficient operation

These techniques can also be costly to maintain and require use of chemicals which need to be disposed of.