Biophotonics in food technology: Quo vadis?

Abstract:

In the race for feeding the growing population and making a commercial profit, food that is our daily need is manipulated and adulterated in many ways. Food forgery is real, and can cause a concerning impact on the health of an individual. Food forgery includes adulteration, tampering with the colour, flavour, the texture of food, tampering and mislabelling food packages, shortcuts in the farming and manufacturing process, excessive use of growth hormone, or pesticide, usage of substandard ingredients, and many more. Conventional methods for monitoring the quality of food are diligent, invasive, and time taking. Bio-photonic techniques such as infrared spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and imaging technology combined with computational power give a reliable, non-destructive, portable, non-invasive way to do online quality monitoring and shelf-life prediction of the food. Bio-photonics is the interdisciplinary field of science that studies the interaction of light with biological matters. Studying the emission, absorption, and scattering phenomenon of light when it interacts with the food can give us different aspects of food quantity and quality. These techniques have the potential to detect pathogens, contamination, and protein and lipid structural changes in food at the molecular level. This review article aims to summarize the different spectroscopic techniques and their challenges in analysing and monitoring the different aspects of food quality.