Food quality control in the food industry is the process of monitoring and verifying food product quality throughout the supply chain1. The ultimate goal is to verify that products meet stringent criteria for safety, taste, appearance, and other factors1. Key procedures in food quality control include2: Product & Recipe Formulation

1. Food Quality control
Lecture 1

2. Introduction to Food Quality control
• What is quality?
• Quality is a term which denotes a degree of excellence, a high
standard or value. Quality of foods may be defined as the composite
of those characteristics that differentiate individual units of a product,
and have significance in determining the degree of acceptability of
that unit to the user Kramer (1965).

3. Conti….
• Food Quality:
• The four principal quality factors in food are the following:
• Appearance, comprising colour, shape, size, gloss, etc. is based on optical properties and visual
manifestation of size and shape.
• Flavor: comprising taste (perceived on tongue) and odour (perceived in the olfactory centre in the
nose), is the response of receptor in the oral cavity to chemical stimuli.
• Texture, is the response of the tactile senses to physical stimuli that result from contact between
some part of the body and the food

4. Conti…
• Nutrition Cost, convenience and packaging are also important but
not considered quality factors. Of the above listed the first three are
termed as “sensory acceptable factors” because they are perceived by
the senses directly. Nutrition is a quality factor that is not an
acceptability factor as it is not perceived by the senses.

5. Conti…
• Texture, is the response of the tactile senses to physical stimuli that result from
contact between some part of the body and the food
• Nutrition Cost, convenience and packaging are also important but not
considered quality factors. Of the above listed the first three are termed as
“sensory acceptable factors” because they are perceived by the senses directly.
Nutrition is a quality factor that is not an acceptability factor as it is not perceived
by the senses.

6. Conti…
• As consumers, these four attributes typically affect us in the order
specified above, for example we evaluate the visual appearance and
color first, followed by the taste, aroma, and texture. The appearance
of the product usually determines whether a product is accepted or
rejected; therefore this is one of the most critical quality attributes.

7. Conti…
• Nutritional value is a hidden characteristic that affects our bodies in
ways that we cannot perceive, but this quality attribute is becoming
increasingly valued by consumers, scientists, and the medical
profession Kramer (1965).

8. Conti…
• Food Texture:
• The importance of texture in overall acceptability of foods varies widely,
depending upon the food
• Critical: Those foods in which texture is the dominant quality characteristics, eg.
Meat, porato chips
• Important: Those foods in which texture makes a significant but not a dominant
contribution to the overall quality, contributing, more or less equally, with flavor
and appearance eg. Most fruits, vegetables, bread, candy.

9. Conti…
• Minor: Those foods in which texture makes a negligible contribution to the
overall quality, eg most beverages and thin soups.

10. Conti…
• Definition of texture:
• Texture means those perceptions that constitute the evaluation of a food’ s
physical characteristics by the skin or muscle senses of the buccal cavity,
excepting the sensations of temperature or pain (Matz, 1962).
• By texture we mean those qualities of food that we can feel with fingers, the
tongue, the palate or the teeth. (Potter, 1968).

11. Conti…
• By texture we mean those qualities of food that we can feel with fingers, the
tongue, the palate or the teeth. (Potter, 1968).
• Texture is the attribute of a substance resulting from a combination of physical
properties and perceived by the senses of touch, sight and hearing. Physical
properties may include size, shape, number, nature and conformation of
constituent structural elements (Jowitt, 1974).

12. Conti…
• Texture: all the rheological and structural attributes of a food product
perceptible by means of mechanical, tactile and when appropriate
visual and auditory receptors (International Organization for
standards, standard 5492/3, 1979)

13. Conti…
• Texture of foods has the following characteristics:
• It is a group of physical properties that derive from the structure of the food.
• It belongs under the mechanical or theological subheading of physical properties.
• It consists of a group of properties, not a single property.
• Texture is sensed by the feeling of touch, usually in mouth, but other parts of
body may be involved (hands).

14. Conti…
• It is not related to chemical senses of taste or odour.
• Objective measurement is by means of functions of mass, distance
and time only

15. Relationship between textural properties and popular
nomenclature

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