Time-Domain NMR in Quality Control: Standard Applications in Food

Although NMR is ubiquitously applied for chemical analysis and structural research as well as in its clinical adaptation of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), its use in quality control/quality assurance (QC/QA) is often not very well known. It is this successful application field of NMR, which is dealt with in this contribution. The field of QC/QA with pulsed NMR has started about 35 years ago in a cooperation of Unilever Research (The Netherlands) and Bruker Physik AG. The idea was raised to build a small table-top time-domain (TD)-NMR analyzer for the solid-to-liquid ratio analysis on fat compositions. The method based on the first TD-NMR analyzers has become an immediate success and was introduced in all major fat facilities world-widely. Nowadays, this method is widely adapted and well known as the socalled Solid Fat Content (SFC) determination [1]. It is recognized as an International Standard Method [2–4]. Presently, the pool of TD-NMR applications in the field of QC/QA summarizes more than 50 different procedures of which more than half are targeted towards food. In this article, the following application fields will be addressed: