PICK OF THE NEWS


SHERLOCK WINS TOP SILVER AWARD T


he Austrian company Insort GmbH was awarded a silver medal at this year’s Anuga FoodTec (International


FoodTec Award 2012) for its development of the Sherlock Separator and associated technology. The Sherlock Separator employs state-


of-the-art Chemical Imaging Technology to bring recent advances in near-infrared spectroscopic imaging to the food industry – with the aim of bringing an extra dimension of quality assurance to food production. The precision of laboratory based


analytical techniques using near-infrared spectroscopy is well established and will continue to be of great use to the food industry. With recent advances in the continuous development of Chemical Imaging Technology in the nearinfrared, it is now possible to acquire in-line process data of the chemical characteristics of food produce in real-time, at industrial levels of through-put. Many applications, such as monitoring food produce streams


for relevant chemical data, inspection for foreign objects or complex grading and sorting of food, can now be implemented in an industrial setting. Potato Sugarends are the result of the accumulation of


reducing sugars at the ends of potatoes. This common defect is invisible to the naked eye when a potato is raw, however when potatoes are fried it becomes noticeable as an unsightly and unwanted browning of the ends of French fries (due to Maillard reactions). n


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The potato industry only produces partially fried French fries and hence the end customer will be the first to discover the Sugarend defect. Insort GmbH has developed the Sherlock Separator to be a targeted solution for problems relevant to the food industry. “With this technology it is possible to


detect and sort all the fundamental defects associated with potatoes, such as incomplete peeling, green potatoes and spoilt potatoes. Every kind of foreign object, and more specifically any defects that are normally invisible, can be detected and rejected” explains


Matthias Jeindl, chief executive of Insort GmbH. Chemical Imaging Technology excels at eliminating foreign


objects from food production processing because it only requires the near-infrared spectra representing good quality produce to be able recognise if an object’s infra-red spectrum is dissimilar and hence foreign. It is therefore also possible to scan and classify fruit according


to a quality grading. For instance, when spectral features of a scanned fruit lie within the defined chemical boundaries of ‘good quality’, the classification algorithm will colour the fruit’s image pixels green. Image pixels that contain some chemical signatures that lie outside these defined boundaries will automatically be interpreted as foreign and will correspondingly be coloured red. This enables the Sherlock Separator to easily detect foreign objects – without the requirement that it be taught all possible foreign objects that it may encounter.


Potato Processing Int. Magazine - Digital Digest • www.potatobusiness.com 3­


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