Raman Spectroscopy: Toward a Portable Food Quality-Warning System

Food waste is one of the main problems contributing to climate change as its piling up in landfills produces the greenhouse gas methane. Food waste occurs at every stage of food production; however, the major source of food waste occurs at businesses that supply food to consumers. Industry 4.0 technologies have shown promises in helping reduce food waste in food supply chains. However, more innovative technologies such as Raman spectroscopy holds great promise in helping reduce food waste, but this has largely been ignored in the literature. In this context, we propose a portable Raman platform to monitor food quality during transportation. The developed system was tested in conditions mimicking those present in a refrigerated truck by analyzing chicken samples stored at temperatures of 4 °C. Raman spectra were acquired for non-packaged and packaged samples over the duration of 30 days resulting in 6000 spectra. The analysis of Raman spectra revealed that the system was able to detect noticeable changes in chicken quality starting day six. The main Raman bands contributing to this change were amide I and tyrosine. The proposed system will offer the potential to reduce food losses during transportation by consistently checking the food quality over time.