Journal of Food Quality

Xinhui tangerine peel has valuable medicinal value. The longer it is stored in an appropriate environment, the higher its flavonoid content, resulting in increased medicinal value. In order to correctly identify the age of the tangerine peel, previous studies have mostly used manual identification or physical and chemical analysis, which is a tedious and costly process. This work investigates the automatic age recognition of the tangerine peel based on deep learning and attention mechanisms. We proposed an effective ConvNeXt fusion attention module (CNFA), which consists of three parts, a ConvNeXt block for extracting low-level features’ information and aggregating hierarchical features, a channel squeeze-and-excitation (cSE) block and a spatial squeeze-and-excitation (sSE) block for generating sufficient high-level feature information from both channel and spatial dimensions. To analyze the features of tangerine peel in different ages and evaluate the performance of CNFA module, we conducted comparative experiments using the CNFA-integrated network on the Xinhui tangerine peel dataset. The proposed algorithm is compared with related models of the proposed structure and other attention mechanisms. The experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm had an accuracy of 97.17%, precision of 96.18%, recall of 96.09%, and F1 score of 96.13% for age recognition of the tangerine peel, providing a visual solution for the intelligent development of the tangerine peel industry.

The objective of this study was to examine the impact of different concentrations of black mulberry leaf extract (BMLE) on the microbial quality, lipid oxidation, biogenic amine content, color stability, and sensory attributes of raw chicken meat during a 12-day chilled storage period. The raw chicken meat was treated with 0.1% BHT (positive control), 0.1%, 0.3%, and 0.5% BMLE, and the outcomes were then compared to the results obtained from raw chicken meat with no additive (control). In comparison to the control group, the inclusion of BMLE resulted in a decrease () in pH and thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS), as well as an improvement in redness () (). The addition of BMLE significantly extended the shelf life of raw chicken meats compared to the control, as it limited microbiological development and lipid oxidation during storage (). Additionally, the BMLE exhibited the most potent inhibitory impact on the buildup of these four BAs (tyramine, cadaverine, histamine, and tyramine) in raw chicken samples at the 12-day storage period (). Despite the 0.5% BMLE groups’ lowest results for microbial counts, TBARS, and biogenic amines, the concentration of 0.3% BMLE proved to be the most advantageous in terms of sensory acceptability. These findings suggested that BMLE, rather than artificial chemicals, could be utilized in raw chicken products as a promising natural antioxidant and antibacterial agent.

Chinese yam (Dioscorea polystachya Turczaninow) is widely cultivated in East Asia, whose edible stem is a common vegetable and herb in traditional Chinese medicine. In fruit and vegetable processing, browning is estimated to be a major reason of waste. Browning lowers the nutrition value and brings undesired characteristics in food processing. To develop a secure and low-cost browning inhibiting protocol in yam processing, different thermal treatment conditions and color protectants were tested for their color-protecting ability. Color difference ΔE was calculated to evaluate the browning with a colorimeter. To ensure that the color-protecting treatment does not influence the quality of yam, texture properties and nutrition compositions were quantified. The optimal treatment is as follows: deactivate yam in water bath of 60°C for 10 min and then incubate in 2 g/L citric acid and 1 g/L ascorbic acid for 1 hour. The treatment led to significant decrease of the color difference, with no obvious changes in the texture properties and nutrition value. To summarize, this research provides an ideal color-protecting solution in yam processing.

Foliar calcium (Ca) treatment exhibits strong potential for enhancing yield and quality in some fruit crops. This study aimed to assess the impact of foliar application of Ca-organomineral (Ca-OM) suspension on total soluble solids (TSS) and Ca dynamics in leaves and berries across five red currant cultivars during the vegetation and storage. A randomized block design with two treatments: (1) Control (without Ca-OM treatment) and (2) foliar Ca-OM treatment, with three repetitions, was applied on five different red currant cultivars. Although foliar Ca-OM treatments did not impact Ca or TSS in leaves, they positively influenced Ca and TSS in fruits, displaying significant variability among cultivars. In addition, Ca-OM treatment increased berry density, reduced abscission, and inhibited the development of diseases, extending storage periods for “Lvovyanka,” “Vika,” and “Gazel” cultivars by three to seven days compared to the Ca-OM untreated control. Ca-OM treatment in the early stages of the ontogenesis of currants provided a high percentage of Ca intake in berries. At the stage of complete maturation, the Ca content in berries decreased and depended on the ripening period of the cultivars. Before harvesting, Ca-OM increased the strength of berries (Fc) and reduced the shedding of berries in the clusters (Fs). At the vegetation stage, Ca-OM increased TSS in berries, and the content of TSS depended on the genotype and weather conditions. The Ca-OM treatment and low temperatures contributed to preserving berry density, reducing the shedding of berries and PLW, and restraining the development of diseases during storage. In addition, the high content of TSS and Ca in berries against the background of a slow rate of decrease in berry density in the Ca-OM variants ensured an extension of the shelf life of “Lvovyanka,” “Vika,” and “Gazel” by three to seven days compared to the control untreated with Ca-OM. Clustering analyses identified these cultivars as similar in terms of TSS and calcium content in fruits, emphasizing their common traits. The study underscores the potential of foliar Ca treatment to enhance berry quality during growth and storage, significantly improve storage duration, and fortify resistance against adverse factors, presenting promising opportunities for elevating yield and quality in specific red currant cultivars.

Most of the beverages have a high glycemic index, which is attributed to a sudden rise in blood sugar. The beneficial role of functional foods combination provided the tool to perform and design our study to develop an instant beverage mix (IBM) that might be revealed as the favorable therapeutic potential for the treatment of hyperglycemia and act as a functional beverage. Therefore, resistant fibre-rich ingredients/raw materials were used to formulate the cereal-based instant beverage (CIB). CIB was formulated using black rice flour (40–70%), germinated lentil flour (10–20%), sweet potato flour (10–20%), and mulberry powder (10–20%). The product formulation was optimized with respect to the following responses such as color and appearance, texture, flavor, taste, and overall acceptability using a D-optimal mixture design. The results revealed that the variation in raw ingredients significantly affected the organoleptic properties of trials. The ratio 40 : 20 : 20 : 20 of black rice: germinated lentil: sweet potato: mulberry was found to be optimum for the development of CIB. Optimized CIB had 9.71 ± 0.10 g/100 g of crude protein, 4.73 ± 0.09 g/100 g of fat, and 4.48 ± 0.06 g/100 g of crude fibre. Moreover, the total mineral content and carbohydrate content were found to be 1.08 ± 0.07 g/100 g and 72.45 ± 0.44 g/100 g, respectively, whereas, the energy value was 371.21 ± 4.23 kcal. In vivo glycemic index was also performed for the optimized CIB. The findings showed a lower glycemic response (37.70) than the diabetic control group, and blood glucose was found to be lowered (279.67 ± 20.06 to 227.17 ± 13.44 mg/dL) via the hypoglycemic mechanism. Thus, the optimized CIB exhibited a therapeutic effect against diabetic conditions and might be a healthy instant beverage for human consumption.

The increasing world population needs a standard balanced diet to address malnutrition problems. For this purpose, seed priming is one of the best techniques, which helps to increase the production of functional and nutritional food crops. Different techniques have been used for seed priming, but biological priming is the most frequently used because biocontrol agents offer a friendly environment for the growth of food crops. In this study, Momordica charantia L. seeds were subjected to a strain of Enterobacter sp. FD17 as a biocontrol agent at different time exposures (i.e., 24 h, 48 h, and 72 h). Leaf growth, flavonoids, chlorophyll content, amino acids, soluble sugars, protein, and total soluble phenolics were studied in the vegetative stage. The yield of nutritive components was evaluated from fruit, peel, and pulp of M. charantia. Biopriming was revealed to improve the final emergence rate, mean emergence time, seedling vigor, emergence index, and vigor indices I and II. Among the growth parameters, the root (0.45 ± 0.045 g) and shoot fresh weight (1.23 ± 0.05 g), leaf area (15.52 ± 1.5 cm), shoot length (30.33 ± 0.58 cm), number of flowers (6 ± 1.0), fruit weight (96.33 ± 1.15 g), and germination percentage (56.67 ± 11.55%) were also improved. Among biochemical analyses, biopriming improved chlorophyll a (6.33 ± 0.58 mg/g) and b (8.58 ± 2.5 mg/g), total soluble sugar (33.13 ± 2.24%), and total chlorophyll content (9.0 ± 1.5 mg/g). The nutritional analysis showed that free amino acids (1.43 ± 0.02 mg/g), total soluble sugar (42.53 ± 1.65%), ash (20.53 ± 2.57%), and catalase (347.47 ± 34.76 U/g) were increased in fruit, while crude fiber (3.62 ± 0.1%) and peroxidase (5.61 ± 0.34 U/g) in peel and protein and metabolizable energy in peel and fruit were increased. Among the water, acetone, and methanol extracts, the maximum antibacterial activity was shown by methanol extracts of leaves against Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacterial species (i.e., Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus, respectively) with inhibitory diameters of 3 mm. Biopriming also improved the phenolic contents in the leaves and fruits of M. charantia. Biopriming treatment was also revealed to be directly correlated with antiglycation activity. Therefore, biopriming treatment on seeds could be used to manipulate plant cell metabolism with a substantial improvement in phenolic content, antibacterial activity, and growth of M. charantia.