Project
Kinetic and mechanistic insight into browning of heat processed fruitbased products during storage
A major quality loss during ambient storage of heat preserved fruit-based products is color degradation, determining consumer acceptability and defining the shelf-life of these products. Color degradation results from the combined effect of fading of natural pigments and formation of brownish compounds. The development of brownish compounds can originate from enzyme- and non enzyme-catalyzed reactions, the former being negligible in heat processed fruit products due to enzyme inactivation and low pH. Notwithstanding the extensive amount of literature on nonenzymatic browning in a wide variety of products/processes, major bottlenecks remain: (i) most studies use a targeted approach, where a single reaction intermediate or end product or reaction pathway is monitored; (ii) many studies are limited to simplified model systems; and/or (iii) the investigated processing window is not relevant for heat preserved fruit-based products in terms of thermal process intensity and storage conditions. There is a need to gain further insight into nonenzymatic browning of shelf-stable fruit-based products by non-targeted approaches in more fruitrepresentative matrices and focused towards a relevant processing window. The current project proposal aims to gain mechanistic and kinetic insight into non-enzymatic browning reactions in shelf-stable fruit-based products by integration of advanced analytical and data analysis techniques in ‘fruit-derived model systems’ of increasing complexity.