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Food quality is an important concept because the food people choose depends largely on quality. Consumer preference is important to the food manufacturer, who wants to gain as wide a share of the market for the product as possible. Quality is difficult to
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Evaluation of Food Quality
Introduction Food quality is an important concept because the food people choose depends largely on quality. Consumer preference is important to the food manufacturer, who wants to gain as wide a share of the market for the product as possible. Quality is difficult to define precisely, though it refers to the degree of excellence of a food and includes all the characteristics of a food that are significant and that make the food acceptable. Whereas certain attributes of a food, such as nutritional quality, can be measured by chemical analysis, food acceptability is not easy to measure as it is very subjective. In fact, consumers make subjective judgments using one or more of the five senses every time they select or eat any food. For example, potato chips, celery, and some cereals have a crunchy sound when they are eaten; the taste and smell of foods can be highly appealing or unacceptable; and the appearance and feel of a food are also important in determining its acceptability. Food quality must be monitored on a regular day-to-day basis to ensure that a uniform product is produced and that it meets the required quality control standards. Companies must also monitor the quality of their products during storage while changing ingredients and developing new lines. Objective tests using laboratory equipment are useful for routine quality control, yet they cannot measure consumer preference. The only sure way to determine what a population thinks about any food is to ask them! This is done
using sensory testing and asking panelists to taste a food and give their opinion on it. Both sensory and objective tests are important in evaluating food quality, and ideally, they should correlate with or complement each other. However, some consumer attributes can be correlated to laboratory measurements. For instance, LAB color charts can serve to produce foods within the range of acceptability for consumers. The same is true for texture, which can be correlated to viscosity for flowable products or breaking strength for hard products (more details in the “Texture” section). Flavor is the hardest attribute to predict via analytical measurements.
Aspects of Food Quality Food quality has both subjective and nonsubjective aspects. Appearance, texture, and flavor are largely subjective attributes, whereas nutritional and bacterial quality are not. The last two qualities can be measured objectively, either by chemical analysis, by measuring bacterial counts, or using other specific tests (Sahin and Sumnu 2006). They will only be mentioned briefly in this chapter, and the subjective qualities will be discussed in detail.
Appearance The appearance of a food includes its size, shape, color, structure, transparency or turbidity,
V.A. Vaclavik and E.W. Christian, Essentials of Food Science, 4th Edition, Food Science Text Series, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-9138-5_1, # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
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dullness or gloss, and degree of wholeness or damage. While selecting a food and judging it
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