Food and Beverage Quality Testing: Key Analytes, Challenges and Solutions for Food Processors

What is Food and Beverage Quality Testing?

Food quality and food safety are often considered as one, but both are independently important and should be addressed separately to help produce the best possible product. Food and beverage quality testing is essential for food processors to help ensure consistency, regulatory compliance and consumer satisfaction.

There are multiple methods to test the quality of food and beverages. One key approach is to determine the levels of notable food quality analytes, such as acids, alcohols, and sugars, using enzymatic methods.

While often naturally occurring, these analytes can also be manually added to products to enhance flavour profiles and can support good food quality when controlled. However, when present in varied or excessive quantities, they can have the opposite effect, contributing to poor taste, appearance and textures. Quantitative testing for these key food quality analytes helps to ensure that food and beverages are fit for the consumer market and meet consumer expectations.

Why is Quality Testing of Food and Beverages Important?

Consumer demand for high-quality food and beverages continues to be a growing trend, and therefore by regularly monitoring the quality of your products, food producers can enhance brand perception, improve customer satisfaction, and maintain labelling compliance.

Key food and beverage quality analytes at a glance:

• Lactose concentration is monitored in lactose-free and low-lactose dairy products, foods, and beverages, including infant formula, to help ensure transparency for consumers.
• Citric acid levels in food and beverage products should be tested to maintain a consistent taste, stability, and shelf life, aligning with formulation and labelling requirements.
• Acetic acid is a natural byproduct of food and beverage fermentation, and can cause an unwanted vinegar-like flavour when found in excess.
• Ammonia levels can be monitored to determine the flavour development of wine, but can also indicate spoilage in non-fermented foods. 
• Ethanol should be monitored in food and beverages to help ensure legal compliance for labelling purposes and consumer awareness. 
• Fructose & Glucose levels in food and beverages should be monitored due to their impact on taste, labelling, tax classification, and their indication of spoilage.
• Malic acid is monitored in wine production to achieve a balanced mouthfeel.
• Lactic acids are also monitored in wine to determine flavour and act as a key indicator of spoilage in non-fermented foods.

Whether occurring naturally or being added to a product, monitoring these quality analytes is crucial for multiple industries, most notably the dairy, wine and fruit juice industries. 

There are allowable limits by law for some of the analytes mentioned, and levels should be quantified and recorded as part of effective food and beverage quality testing to avoid risk of fines, recalls and poor customer satisfaction.

The Challenges of Food and Beverage Quality Testing

Consumers don’t only expect safety, they also expect consistent quality. Consistency brings familiar enjoyment that often keeps people returning for more, building trust and forming positive brand perception. However, variability can arise at multiple stages of production, and maintaining consistency is a challenge that, if not done, can lead to costly rework, scrappage, recalls and poor brand perception. 

Implementing testing to assess the quality of food and beverages before, during and after production is not a new concept, but it can come with challenges for food processors. Manual, time-intensive workflows that require highly skilled scientists can increase labour costs and delay decision-making. At the same time, limited in-house automation and reagent storage complexities can limit throughput capacity and increase storage needs and waste.

How to Optimise Your Food and Beverage Quality Testing

The Megazyme® by Neogen® Liquid Ready™ range is taking innovation to the next level, offering increased ease of use and efficiency in food and beverage quality testing. Providing a simple, ready-to-use solution for testing key quality analytes, the Megazyme Liquid Ready range can help optimise quality testing by:

1. Eliminating the need for reagent preparation, saving time and reducing the chance of human error during test preparation.
2. Enabling flexibility by being compatible with both manual and automated formats.
3. Providing a simplified workflow that reduces handling versus traditional kits, increasing lab efficiency and productivity. 
4. Providing expert support in the form of Neogen’s technical service team. 

Discover more about how Liquid Ready kits can benefit your laboratory here or read our frequently asked questions.