The potential use of Near-Infrared spectroscopy for the quality assessment of eggs and egg products.

In a context of high productivity, eggs’ quality assessment is necessary for enhanced safety and quality assurance towards the consumers and feedback for producers. The quality assessment of eggs and egg products is performed using destructive and time-consuming methods, therefore the use of rapid tools becomes mandatory, especially in the case of a high production rate. Near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is considered a very reliable and rapid technique with large use in food industry. At the farm level, NIR spectroscopy technique would be an interesting tool to determine the chemical and physical properties of eggs, eggshell and internal quality and, moreover, this information may help the layer farm manager when a problem occurs in the flock. Its application in the egg industry is aimed at the quality changes in eggs during storage and quality assessment of the egg products, through the compositional analysis. It is possible and in some cases successful the prediction and/or determination of different parameters such as: protein, total lipid and total solids content (for liquid egg products), polyunsaturated fatty acids (for freeze-dried egg yolk), moisture, fat and protein content (for spray-dried whole eggs). In addition, for the white colored shell eggs, the detection of blood and meat spots is also successful. Further studies with NIR and near infrared hyper spectral imaging system (NIR-HSI) are needed in this direction, as the results obtained until now are very promising for the development of a rapid tool for quality assessment of eggs and egg products.