Colour Measurement for Solid Food

The consumer eats with their eyes, so improving the consistency of products and developing exciting and realistic coloured products will help a producer's products to compete on the shelf and improve consumer perception of quality on the plate. Inconsistent colours can damage the perception of a brand and lead to increased waste.

Colour data can be used as a process control tool, and an indicator of flavour, freshness or degradation over time, or temperature.

Konica Minolta Measuring Instruments are widely used in the food industry, in development labs, at goods-in, in-line, or at quality control for virtually all solid foodstuffs such as breads, meats, cheeses, pasta, cakes, etc. Our solutions help organisations to produce consistent and appealing products, and generate valuable data that helps to save costs, cut waste, and improve the quality of products.

Our versatile benchtop instruments have many advantages for the laboratory setting as they are able to measure a greater number of sample types easily. Benchtop instruments have larger measurement apertures and include innovative new features, such as a sample viewer camera that aid in fast yet accurate work. Our portable colorimeters are synonymous with quality control measurements and particularly in the food industry, where at this stage in the process spectral data is not required. A tristimulus meter provides an accurate and traceable alternative to a spectrophotometer, providing data that corresponds to the human observer whilst also being comparatively robust. Many food products with inhomogeneous colour can be best measured by the CR-410 which quickly provides data that correlates with human perception by averaging the measurement over its large 50mm measuring aperture.

In recent years, the possibilities of automated inspection and measurement have greatly increased. Through Konica Minolta Group company SPECIM, we are able to offer our customers both laboratory and production hyperspectral systems that can perform a range of tasks for the food industry such as foreign object detection, fat content analysis, sorting, topping coverage, and packing inspection.