Ricerc@Sapienza

Ripening is a crucial step to guarantee the high commercial value of cheddar cheese, one of the dairy products the European Union exports the most. Although several methods have lately been proposed to assess its ageing process from a chemical point of view, the majority of them is not particularly time-efficient and implies destructive analytical tests, thus, exhibiting limitations for, e.g., industrial applications. Here, a fast approach based on combining Raman and Mid-InfraRed (MIR) spectroscopy with ANOVA-Simultaneous Component Analysis (ASCA) is proposed in a low-level data fusion framework. This approach allowed to evaluate how storage temperature and time (as well as their interaction) influence cheddar ripening in a relatively cheap, rapid and green fashion. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.